We covered it before stating Abandoned, an indie horror game (supposedly), would either be a groundbreaking social success, or a complete and total fraud. Turns out it was both.
Abandoned has gone on a long road from being announced on the PlayStation Blog with absolutely no assets to back it, to a fake demo that Sony executives themselves were hyping up on social media. What came of it? Absolutely nothing but rage and disappointment.
At one point Abandoned was a glimmer of hope for Silent Hill, Metal Gear, or Kojima fans in general. The developer behind Abandoned, Hasan Kahraman, was so blatantly bad at lying that it had to be fake, there was no possible way an indie developer would dig a hole as massive as he did and not intentionally be misleading fans on some ghost adventure. And yet, that is exactly what happened. From telling people the game’s title “begins with S and ends with L,” to renders resembling Snake from Metal Gear, to literally posting an image with “Silent Hill 5” on their site, Hasan had walked around the wrong fanbase for the first time in his fraudulent career.
Kojima has engineered fans to look between the lines, to dive deeper into everything they see, and even he has a hard time faking us out, but Hasan thought it was a good idea to target this crowd and create a game that simply teases one of the most eager fans in the world. Silent Hill is coming, but it isn’t from Blue Box or Hasan. Neither are Hasan’s 3 previous games ever going to be made, and eventually his next announcement will also be a fake. The game doesn’t exist. It never has. It never will. Kojima is smarter than this failed campaign and we need Hasan to stop popping up every time Silent Hill is mentioned.
Somehow an “indie developer” got all the eyes in the world on him and couldn’t come up with a simple P.T. knockoff to save face. I mean how many of these games do we have now? Instead we got an uncompressed “teaser trailer” (The official one now removed) utilizing pre-made assets from a 3rd party of a character walking (twice), and a whole lot of nothing.
An article on GameSpot dove deep on the fraud that is Blue Box Studios, but the jist of things is that he intentionally picked this fanbase and basically teased them for months. He had excuses for every mishap, every failed appearance, and eventually the press (us included) started to see him for what he is. A fraud. Sadly some people are still gullible and follow his private chats online where Hasan tries to scam them out of addresses, money, and assets. This group includes at least one child. In these chats there were many instances where people pressed for updates only to be banned and kicked out. There were angry outbursts, and fake NDAs where people were giving up their addresses when Hasan noted a fake connection to Sony.
Which is why it was important to me to follow up on this. I could have just been disappointed like everyone else and said oh well, we all knew he was lying. However, with his silent groups and threatening fake NDA contracts, it appears Blue Box knows how to get just enough credibility to scam investors, or young fans that just want a glimpse of something new. Anyone with some money can get on the PlayStation Blog (roughly 20k dollars will get you full coverage, i’m sure it’s less for just a blog post), see The Life Of A Black Tiger for further proof of how easy coverage is to get. Once this credibility was established, Blue Box was swift in gaining coverage from major outlets and even attempting to secure a slot in The Summer Games, but that ended up failing because Blue Box couldn’t piece together a trailer for the event. This is where I stopped following them because any indie developer that gets Geoff Keighley’s attention and then blows him off entirely can’t be taken seriously.
Truth is they got a lot of credibility fast, and with all the lies swirling around about working with Konami or Kojima, and even Sony, it would be really easy to sucker some “investors” to send some money, or information. Hopefully nobody in this private group did so, but several are stating they fear stating anything even still due to the NDA (which has no legal backing). But they say that the angry outbursts of Hasan are of concern as well, and someone of that nature having your address or information isn’t too pretty.
So yes, we are getting a new Silent Hill. It isn’t officially announced, but it isn’t going to be the crap we saw with the Abandoned teaser. If you still have that spamware sitting on your PlayStation, delete it. Tell your PS5 feed to stop alerting you about the non existent game. It’s dead. Wait for Konami, Kojima, or Sony to officially reveal something. It’s coming, and it won’t be from a no name indie developer that skips out on fans. If you are contacted by the dummy corporation Blue Box Studios then laugh at them and run.
