Gearbox Software considered making a Blade Runner game

Posted Nov 20th 2009 3:00PM by John Callaham
Filed under: Biz

It's one of the most revered sci-fi movies of all time, and at one point developer Gearbox Software thought hard about making it into a game. The 1982 classic Blade Runner still holds up well and has been the subject of game adaptations before, most notably a 1997 released action-adventure game from the now defunct Westwood Studios.

On the Official Xbox Magazine web site, Gearbox's head man Randy Pitchford states that at one time Gearbox had pursued getting the Blade Runner game license rights, saying, "We chased it down and we could of had it." However, they decided to abandon their plans for the game after looking at the costs. Pitchford states, " . . . the way we wanted to do it, we wanted to spend 25-million dollars. And when you do the math on that, we weren't going to make it back." That's likely true, although we have to wonder what kind of game design would require such a high budget.

Tags: blade-runner, gearbox-software

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

I'm glad. Gearbox isn't even close to a good enough developer to handle something like Blade Runner, and their engine of choice, UE3, could not do it justice.Posted at 3:21PM on Nov 20th 2009 by asfm

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