Hideo Kojima

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of Blue Box Game Studios, Hideo Kojima and Silent Hills, let me take you back to late 2012… Gangnam Style was still in the charts, Django Unchained had just dropped in cinemas and cryptocurrency was still just a weird obscure thing that only sweaty nerds your paranoid uncle cared about. Then, – completely out of nowhere, – a trailer appears on the internet teasing a new trippy-looking game called The Phantom Pain. It is from a developer that nobody has ever heard of called Moby Dick Studios with some weird dude covered in bandages called Joakim Mogren at the helm. The code-cracking began in YouTube comments and on gaming subreddits. The conspiracy unfolded and eventually it turned out to to be a complex hoax that led to the unveiling of Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain. Then, a few years later, Kojima does the same thing again when he releases the red herring that was the P.T demo, which wound up being a “playable teaser” for the much anticipated, (sadly since cancelled,) Silent Hills. Could the same thing be happening once again with the upcoming PS5 exclusive Abandoned from unknown devs, BLUE BOX Game Studios? Could this title actually turn out to be the long-awaited resurrection of Silent Hills? Because it’s either that or a very clever marketing strategy from a small-time developer riding the Silent Hills hype train to promote their title. Either way, there are too many parallels that can be drawn for this whole thing to be a coincidence. Don your tinfoil hat and join me friends as we head down the rabbit hole together. I hope you all have your whiteboards and string at the ready, as I am about to blow your mind. Part 1: Previously unheard of developer BLUE BOX Game Studios announces ‘Abandoned’ On the 7th of April 2021, a post by Hasan Kahraman appears on the PlayStation Blog unveiling a teaser for a PS5 exclusive, first-person survival horror game titled; Abandoned. Kahraman is the Game Director at BLUE BOX Game Studios. The sleuths over on Reddit have since pointed out that if you go to the 49 second mark in the video above, you will see the image below showing writing on an outside wall that reads; “Kill The Trespassers.” A tree blocks a couple of letters of the text. Those letters being blocked just so happen to be “T” and “P,” or PT. Other than that though, upon first glance, the post appeared to be just like any other PlayStation Blog post announcing a new title. These kinds of posts certainly aren’t rare on the blog and initially nobody paid much attention to the post other than some negative reactions criticizing the amateur sounding VO work and the complaining about the poor frame rate. A few months down the line, BLUE BOX Game Studios announce that Abandoned will receive its very own PS5 app which will allow gamers to watch the game’s trailers in real time on their PS5 console. This is a notably odd thing for a studio to implement and it is certainly not something that is normally done by first-party PlayStation Studios whilst promoting their upcoming game. Therefore, this strange announcement left more than a few people wondering why this small, unknown game studio are the first to pioneer this marketing strategy. The app was initially slated to go live this Sunday on the 20th of June. However, another tweet from the developer states that the app will in fact go live on the 22nd of June. This date is probably the correct one as it is a Tuesday, which is normally the day that new games and apps go up on the PlayStation Store. Part 2: Why this could actually be Kojima leading up to the announcement of Silent Hills Shall we go deeper down the rabbit hole? A couple of days ago BLUE BOX Game Studios Twitter account posts a tweet suggesting that “Abandoned” isn’t actually the title of their game. They tease fans to “Guess the name, which begins with an S and ends with an L. This tweet perks up the ears of gaming conspiracy theorists all over the internet rumours start that Gaming’s God Of Mischief himself, Hideo Kojima is in fact behind this account and this title and Abandoned is yet another ruse concocted to lead up to the re-announcement of Silent Hills. The developer panics and quickly back-tracks to shut down any rumours that may have started based on this tweet. This back-pedalling only becomes more frequent over the next day in comment sections etc. This inevitably leads to the Streisand effect taking place and more people across the internet begin to take notice. In a later tweet, the developer refers to “Abandoned” in quotation marks, further suggesting that Abandoned is not the true title of the game. In yet another tweet, they confirm that Abandoned is simply a working title for the project. In another, it is stated that teaser that dropped back in April was only ever intended to be an announcement that the game was in development and that “the game itself has never been shown.” If we look again at the game’s title, the choice to use the word, “Abandoned,” could also be a reference to how Silent Hills and by extension Kojima were abandoned by Konami seven years ago. If this false project is actually an elaborate tease for Kojima Productions to eventually announce that they are in fact returning to work on Silent Hills, then Abandoned would a very apt working title under which to restart development on the game. Are you still with me? Because this is still just the tip of the iceberg. Part 3: You Wanna Get Nuts? Let’s Get Nuts! Strap in Alice, because we are past the point of no return. We shall begin with the logo for BLUE BOX Game Studios. Look familiar? That is because it is pretty much the exact same as the PlayStation Studios logo, right down to the font. Another parallel that can be drawn, is how the