Gearbox Could’ve Made A Blade Runner Game, But It Didn’t Want To Go Out Of Business

The studio behind Borderlands, Aliens: Colonial Marines and Duke Nukem Forever once had an opportunity to make a Blade Runner game. It passed, its founders say, just like it passed on the planned video game version of Michael Mann’s Heat.

Gearbox Software co-founder Randy Pitchford tells the UK Official PlayStation Magazine, by way of CVG, that it had designs on making a new Blade Runner game—the last was Westwood’s 1997 point and click adventure—but to actually do so would have sunk the company.

“That game would’ve cost like $US40 [million]to make and sold about 600,000 units – and that would have been the end of us,” Pitchford says. “There’s no rational business model that would have allowed that to make sense. If we’d made it with a business model that did work, it would not have been the Blade Runner game we all would have wanted.”

Thankfully, the studio is still afloat, working on its long-announced Aliens shooter and the recently revealed Brothers In Arms: Furious 4.

Sorry, Blade Runner fans, you’re going to have to settle for the Hollywood sequel or prequel, which the movie’s producers are still figuring out.

Pitchford: Blade Runner game ‘would’ve been the end of Gearbox’ [CVG]