The Blade Runner video game is a fine point-and-click-adventure, but it’s a wee bit… dated. That’s why Nightdive Studios — the same people behind the remasters of System Shock and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter — are working hard to rebuild Blade Runner through intense reverse-engineering.
This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Typically, developers have all of the important assets needed to create a game, but that wasn’t the case with Blade Runner. The source code had been lost when Westwood Studios moved from Las Vegas to Los Angeles after merging with Electronic Arts. Nightdive, however, wasn’t going to let a little thing like missing source code stop them.
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“It’s true that the original Blade Runner source code was lost,” Nightdive’s head of business development Larry Kuperman, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter. “We painstakingly reverse-engineered the code, importing it into our own KEX engine, a powerful tool that allows us to do console ports of classic titles, even in the face of quite challenging situations.”
You can expect to play Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition sometime later this year on PC and consoles.