Nightdive Studios, the studio behind the impending System Shock remake, revealed an ambitious remastering effort for the 1997 PC adventure game Blade Runner in 2020.
The project’s goal was to remaster and preserve the iconic Westwood Studios title, which pioneered numerous concepts and themes utilized in subsequent 3D adventure games, bringing it to consoles for the first time.
Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition ran into some issues and was pushed back from its original 2020 release date indefinitely, but it finally seems to be coming on current platforms next week.
Blade Runner is a 1997 3D adventure game based on the 1982 Ridley Scott film, inspired by the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by sci-fi novelist Phillip K. Dick.
READ MORE: NPC Name Revealed in Starfield
The game’s plot parallels that of the original film, taking place in a dystopian Los Angeles in November 2019 but following a Blade Runner called Ray McCoy, who, like the film’s protagonist Rick Deckard, is entrusted with tracking down a renegade gang of Replicants.
The game contains several of the film’s characters and performers, including Sean Young as Rachael, and incorporates elements of Vangelis’ classic film soundtrack.
In collaboration with Blade Runner film studio Alcon Entertainment, Nightdive Studios, which has been responsible for many critically acclaimed remaster projects in recent years such as Doom 64, Quake, and Shadow Man Remastered, announced in 2020 that it would remaster Westwood’s original title and bring it to modern platforms.
This news coincided with the publication of an AI-unscaled 4K remake of the game’s first cutscene. Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition was then postponed indefinitely owing to technical challenges, which Nightdive’s CEO said were caused by a lack of archival source code, forcing the company to recreate the game in its proprietary KEX engine, which had previously been used in earlier remasters.
Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition has been re-released with a June 23rd, 2022 release date across all major digital marketplaces after a brief appearance at the Limited Run Games LRG3 showcase.
The game will cost $9.99, and the download size for the Nintendo Switch has already been revealed at 3.7GB. Limited Run Games will sell a $34.99 physical version for those who want a little more.
The remaster includes rebuilt and enhanced cinematics, which now runs at 60 frames per second instead of the originals’ 15 frames per second, contemporary gamepad compatibility, anisotropic texture filtering, and SMAA Anti Aliasing, among other features. The trophy and achievement lists have already gone up, and the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X versions have previously been verified to support 4K output.
