The Crazy Story Of Abandoned, The Game That Never Was

It’s been a long two years, but if you can cast your mind back to April of 2021, you may recall the internet was abuzz following the announcement of a new horror game that looked awfully P.T-like. It was April 7th, to be exact, and a new PlayStation blog post had just announced Abandoned, a “first-person horror survival shooter set in a highly detailed open world environment”, as per the game’s director, Hasan Kahraman.

Developed by Blue Box Game Studios, Abandoned was revealed as a PlayStation 5 exclusive targeting a Q4 2021 release, which always seemed like an optimistic proposition considering the same post stated that Abandoned was “at an early development stage,” so no gameplay could be shown. That means Blue Box had around 4 to 6 months to go from early development stages to full release. From the get-go, something seemed fishy about Abandoned.

But Abandoned’s hopeful release window was just the beginning of what would become a whirlwind of controversy, rumours, conspiracy theories, and some good-old fashioned delusional craziness.

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Shortly after Abandoned was announced via the PlayStation website, a Reddit post appeared, suggesting that Abandoned and its creator, Hasan Kahraman, was actually just a facade for a new Hideo Kojima game. The connections grew and grew over the course of many months, but the initial post references Kahraman and Kojima sharing the same initials, Blue Box potentially being a Death Stranding easter egg due to the letters ‘BB’, and the fact that this is exactly the kind of oddball innocent mischief that Kojima tends to get up to.

Back in 2012, Kojima secretly revealed Metal Gear Solid V as simply “The Phantom Pain” under a new studio known as Moby Dick Studio. The game was supposedly led by Joakim Mogren, but fans quickly worked out that Mogren’s first name was an anagram for Kojima. So, when you take into account that Kojima has actually done this before, it’s understandable for fans to speculate that he might be doing it again.

But then, less than 24 hours after the announcement of Abandoned, a statement was issued via Blue Box’s official website, shutting down the theories making connections between Abandoned and Hideo Kojima. “We have no association with Hideo Kojima nor do we claim to have any association nor was it our intention to claim such a statement. We are a small group of developers working on a passionate title we wanted to work on for a long time.” the statement read.

But once the internet gets its claws stuck into something, it doesn’t like to let go. IGN then published an interview with Kahraman on April 8th – still less than 24 hours after the game’s announcement – where he continued to express that neither he nor Blue Box has any form of affiliation with renowned video game auter, Hideo Kojima.

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At this point in time, very little was actually known about Abandoned. PlayStation’s blog post teased a different kind of first-person shooter compared to the modern-day norm, stating that Abandoned “requires you to hide and plan every shot before pulling the trigger.” Kahraman went on to reveal further details about the game to IGN, “We wanted to make a game that feels real. Like when reloading, you get to see the whole animation, while in combat. Or when you get hit, you really need to stop the bleeding in order to continue fighting.”

So, the game itself certainly sounds like an interesting mix of genres, which Kahraman describes as a “first-person horror survival shooter” in the announcement post. But sadly, Abandoned’s controversy isn’t just confined to crazy fan theories. After a pretty wild 24 hours for Blue Box, it was all quiet until May 30th, when the studio announced via a now-deleted tweet that Abandoned would be receiving a real-time trailer app on June 20th. The app was apparently going to reveal new gameplay trailers that were rendered in real-time, thanks to the hardware of the PlayStation 5.

Despite the continued denial by Kahraman, a large number of fans continued to speculate on the connection between Abandoned and Hideo Kojima. Then, to make things even worse, another now-deleted tweet by Blue Box hinted at the name of Abandoned actually being Silent Hill. The tweet read, “Guess the name: Abandoned = (First letter S, Last letter L). Reveal closing in…” For the unaware, Hideo Kojima was working on a new Silent Hill game with movie director Guillermo del Toro years earlier, but the project was canceled in 2015 after Kojima split ways with publisher Konami.

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As you can imagine, it didn’t take long for Blue Box to apologise for the misunderstanding and attempt to set the record straight. In a tweet that actually hasn’t been deleted, Blue Box said, “We wanted to set things straight. We have no relations with Konami. Silent Hill is owned by Konami. We do not have any relations with Hideo Kojima. It was never our intention to tease the name as Silent Hill. We sincerely apologize for this.”

Blue Box then announced that the previously announced real-time app was being delayed to June 25 due to “localization issues.” Fair enough, these things happen. But when June 25 rolled around, a video update from Hasan appeared on the Blue Box Twitter account, announcing that the app still wasn’t ready and would be pushed to the beginning of August.

So August rolls around, and the app launches. Well, kind of…it’s broken. So, Blue Box patches the app a few days later. After almost a month of back-and-forth, is it finally time to check out these real-time trailers Blue Box had promised us? No, the app consisted of a 4-second clip of a man walking, which had already been posted to Blue Box’s Twitter account before the launch of the app. As you can imagine, fans weren’t happy.

Shortly after the catastrophe of the app launch, Kahraman did an interview with NME, where the outlet “confirmed” the game was most definitely not a new Silent Hill or Metal Gear game. Abandoned’s creator also explained what went wrong with the real-time app:

“It started with engine issues when we had the patch delay and we couldn’t really resolve that. We weren’t alone – we had some other teams working with that so, it got really out of hand. Maybe it’s because we use Unreal Engine 5, which is in early access, which is not really recommended for a project like this. But we did it anyway because we needed the features that it had.”

Kahraman also said that the studio plans on adding more content to the app in due time. Given that it’s been almost two years since he made that comment, I decided to download and check the app for that new content that was promised. And of course the app still doesn’t have any content on it. Who would have guessed it?

Things started to die down shortly after the failed real-time app launch. The internet pointed, laughed, then moved on to the next thing. There was, however, apparently still a handful of people sending Blue Box death threats – which is a really fucked up thing to do over a video game – causing the studio to release a statement in October of 2021 asking that they are given space to work on Abandoned.

Given the increasingly dubious nature of the whole game however, some questioned whether this message was concocted simply to elicit sympathy. Death threats should always be taken seriously of course, but by this point any information coming out of Blue Box was starting to look decidedly non-serious.

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Despite the failed attempt at launching an app, Blue Box announced in December 2021 that a prologue chapter would be released in Q1 2022. Unlike the announcement of the real-time app, Blue Box kept this announcement on the down-low. It was spotted by PushSquare, who discovered the reveal hidden away in a PlayStation news card. As expected, Blue Box went on to delay the release of the prologue chapter in March 2022 as they “underestimated their development roadmap.”

So, to recap, we had claims linking Abandoned to Hideo Kojima, a plethora of statements from Blue Box denying it, a failed real-time app, and now a delayed prologue chapter. And we’re not even at the good stuff yet!

The following month, in April 2022, a YouTuber by the name of DreamcastGuy tweeted that he had spoken with Hasan Kahraman in a 30-minute phone call where the game director revealed to him that the studio is out of money. In a few follow-up responses, DreamcastGuy said he believed Abandoned was “some minor scam that had blown up.” At this point, Blue Box Studios and Hasan Kahraman had lost all credibility. But the controversy still doesn’t stop there.

A handful of Abandoned’s assets were leaked on Reddit in May 2022, which I guess confirms the game was real to a certain degree? The leak was also verified by the subreddit’s moderators, who confirmed that the user had had contact with Kahraman. The internet quickly began picking apart the god-awful script, which was mockingly dubbed as “game of the year material.”

But what was likely the nail in Abandoned’s theoretical coffin was an exposé piece from GameSpot in June 2022. The report claimed that sources close to Kahraman revealed that Abandoned didn’t even exist, or at least that it was never being actively developed. It also backs up the earlier claims from DreamcastGuy, stating that Abandoned isn’t in active development because the studio is out of money. But the most interesting part of the report revolves around a secret group chat that Kahraman hand-picked fans to be included in.

GameSpot’s sources claim Kahraman created a toxic environment in this chat, even starting a romantic relationship with one individual. He also promised to pay this individual for work on Abandonded’s trophy art, but not until after revenue started to come in following the game’s release. Kahraman also asked another member of this secret group chat to locate a storage space in the US for him, to avoid him having to fly from the Netherlands and do it himself. He promised to pay the individual, but later rescinded the deal.

Both PlayStation and Kahraman refused to comment on the report from GameSpot, and it’s been pretty silent ever since. Word of the mess even reached Kojima, who in November of 2022 called the whole thing a “nuisance.” I’ve attempted to reach out to Kahraman myself for an update on the development of Abandoned, but all email addresses associated with Blue Box have been deleted.

So, was Abandoned really just one big scam? Well, I don’t think so. To me, this was an indie studio that had big ambitions and simply announced their project far too early. Throw a controversial figure into the mix that feeds into conspiracy theorists and makes promises he can’t keep, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. The only saving grace of this story is that there were no pre-orders and no Kickstarter campaign, which means we’ve all just been able to watch this madness from the sidelines without being dragged into the craziness.

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