Jigsaw not quite falling into place
Bloober Team almost ended up tackling a very different horror franchise than Blair Witch. In a new interview, Bloober CEO Piotr Babieno says the studio was offered the chance to take on several horror IPs including Saw, but passed on them for Blair Witch.
Speaking to IGN during the Digital Dragons games conference in Poland, Babieno described how the Blair Witch deal came to be. Bloober was in talks with multiple major movie studios, but passed on offers. Then came Lionsgate.
Lionsgate expressed admiration for Layers of Fear and Observer. The studio offered a list of horror IPs and, according to Babieno, offered Bloober its choice of one.
“We could [have chosen] Saw, which is more popular than Blair Witch, but we decided to take Blair Witch because the universe has many opportunities to build something new,” said Babieno. “That was the reason why we chose this project.”
He goes on to say that being offered these licenses wasn’t a one-off, and the studio has received more offers since Blair Witch. Bloober Team turned them down though, due to other projects in the pipeline.
“Unfortunately, for almost one year, we have [had to say] ‘pass’ to almost everything, because we don’t have capacity to do any more titles at one time,” said Babieno.
Time to play a game
It’s an interesting game of what-if to play, imagining Bloober’s version of a Saw video game. The team went on to tackle Blair Witch instead though, and has seemingly kept busy since.
Currently, Bloober is working with Konami, though the product of that partnership hasn’t been announced. That hasn’t stopped the studio from being the subject of Silent Hill speculation, though.
The team is also working on another project with Take-Two publishing arm Private Division, and another that Babieno teases is in pre-production.