14 DAY TRIAL // Blade Runner has three different versions, all thanks to Ridley Scott, but the games are just one short of a full set. The first Blade Runner title was made all the way back in 1985, while in 1997 an action adventure for the "future noir" was developed. There could have been a third game, and one done by a serious developer, but creation drew the short straw once again as profit handed out the verdict. Gearbox Software was the company that had a game project inspired by the Runner, but, when it crunched some numbers, it saw that, for the title to come out as it would have wanted it to, it would have cost a lot more than it would have made in return.
Randy Pitchford, the man who brought us the amazing Borderlands, is the one who revealed the Blade Runner hope-crusher. "One of my partners, Brian Martell, had Blade Runner on the list [of IPs we wanted to use]," he said in an interview with OXM. "We chased it down and we coulda had it. But that one failed on the business side, because the way we wanted to do it we wanted to spend 25 million dollars. And when you do the math on that, we weren't going to make it back."
But the $25 millions is just the production cost, and that's not even half of the money involved in releasing a game. The other things that need to be taken care of are all the post-production aspects, which mainly represent the distribution and the securing of that distribution.
"You're going to spend 25 million, there's another 10-15 risk just in the publishing process, and then you got another 10-15 million marketing," Pitchford added. "And we didn't think that we could make that back. So that's too bad." The one thing that he could have added were a few details regarding the game, like the genre or at least some generic concept design. Apparently, he's just one of those "if I can't have you, then no one will" types.