With Sony not being at E3 this year, Microsoft took the opportunity to “wow” their in-house guests and players all around the world. There were many surprises, but perhaps the biggest one came early in the conference – and I don’t mean the fact that Keanu Reeves showed up, which he totally did. With 2019 being the 20th anniversary year of one of the best found footage movies of all time, THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, the computing and entertainment giant surprised everyone with a trailer of a new BLAIR WITCH game hitting the PC and Xbox One this summer.
It has been a hot minute since a BLAIR WITCH game was in development – 19 years to be precise – and there’s been many improvements to technology, not only in terms of gaming graphics and abilities, but how we film our own videos as well. Can you imagine if THE BLAIR WITCH was filmed in 2019? Well, keep wondering because this is set in 1996, the same year as the events of the 1999 film. This new game from Lionsgate and Bloober Team (the developers behind the games LAYERS OF FEAR 2 and >observer_) follows a cop and his dog as he searches for a young boy in the Black Hills National Forest near Burkittsville, MD.
As a hardcore BLAIR WITCH fan who owns a Black Hills National Forest t-shirt, as soon as I heard the forest name, I knew what was coming. All I have to say is, “it’s about time!” You often see video games made into films, but it’s rare that a film gets made into a video game, especially a film franchise like the Blair Witch. Bloober Team is known for making eerie, scary, and intense story-driven games, but this is looking bigger than anything they’ve developed before.
BLAIR WITCH is set to release on August 30, 2019 for Xbox One, Windows PC and GoG. I can only hope that PS4 will be added to that list, because that’s one hell of an Xbox exclusive.
