BLUE BOX Game Studios is an independent video game development studio. The company was founded in 2015 by Hasan Kahraman and is based in Leiden, Netherlands.
The company has developed a game called The Haunting, which was published on the Steam game store on December 23, 2020, in early access beta. The game is a first-person horror adventure game, which has the player fighting ghosts using a camera and exploring the mysteries of the Red Water Woods through cinematic storytelling.
In June 2021, BLUE BOX Game Studios released a teaser tweet for a survival horror game in development, known under its working title, Abandoned. The tweet asked fans to guess the name of the upcoming game, which was said to begin with an "S" and end with an "L". This started a conspiracy theory, which BLUE BOX has adamantly denied, that the game developer was developing a reboot of the game Silent Hill and that the head of the company, Hasan Kahraman, was actually game developer Hideo Kojima in disguise. The tweet was later removed, with BLUE BOX Game Studios tweeting emphatically that the company was not behind a Silent Hill reboot.
The conspiracy does not come without precedence. In 2012, a video was released on YouTube by a game developer named Moby Dick Studios, which had been previously unheard of, for a game called Phantom Pain. This turned out to be a release hoax for the Hideo Kojima game Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.
In response to the growing speculation, studio head Hasan Kahraman affirmed in statements and revealed himself in a video to put to rest the rumors that the studio was a front for Hideo Kojima and an upcoming Silent Hill game, while emphasizing that the game studio was legitimate, with real people working for it, and that the upcoming game, under the working title Abandoned, was an original game by the studio.
Hasan Kahraman later interviewed with Bloomberg for an hour to further demystify assertions of the conspiracy and that he is not an actor. The latter assertion was supported by his regular posts on the forum for Unreal Engine game developers over the last few months, seemingly in relation to the Abandoned game, developed by BLUE BOX, and intended for release on the PlayStation 5.
Timeline
Patents
Further Resources
Blue Box Game Studios refutes Silent Hill reboot rumors
Donovan Erskine
Web
June 21, 2021
Blue Box, Abandoned, Kojima And Silent Hill: A Dumb, Fun, Mystery
Dave Thier
Web
June 18, 2021
Steam Curator: BLUE BOX Game Studios
Web
What Is Blue Box? A Vast Conspiracy Around Hideo Kojima Grips the Video Game World
Jason Schreier, Bloomberg
Web
June 22, 2021