I was all ready to click ‘Buy’ on the new ‘Enhanced’ edition of Blade Runner… until the reports of those who were keener and quicker to do so put me off.

To be honest I’d sort of forgotten about it – the last time we wrote about Blade Runner here it was to note that after many years of work by fans the game was finally playable in ScummVM, followed by a confident prediction by FFG’s top news-hound that an actual commercial re-release remained unlikely.

Which was wrong, as it turned out, and since December 2019 gamers have been happily able to purchase the ScummVM, fan-restored, Blade Runner from GOG. Talk of a remastered/enhanced edition soon followed in 2020, but after a muted reaction to sample video footage, the release date was pushed and things went rather quiet.

It’s not just fans who are disappointed with the enhanced edition – those in the games press with fond memories of the original have been quick to highlight their disappointment. The headlines sort of speak for themselves: RPS have gone with ‘The Blade Runner game’s new remaster looks worse’, while PC Gamer have plumped for ‘Blade Runner Enhanced Edition is a disaster, not a remaster’.

The new release has been handled by Nightdive Studios, who have a decent reputation for being specialists when it comes to this sort of thing, having produced, among other things, an enhanced edition of System Shock that seemed to meet with my friend and colleague’s approval.

NB: This capture is of the original, from my dusty archives…

Reading between the lines it sounds as if they found that there wasn’t a lot they could actually do to ‘enhance’ Blade Runner beyond what the ScummVM version team had already achieved, except that they couldn’t actually use or build on any of that work because they wanted to release the new edition on console as well, and that comes with a lot of additional rules.

It’s possible I might still take a look at the Enhanced Edition, especially as GOG will give you 50% off if you already bought the ScummVM release from them, although the consensus seems to be pretty clear that it’s not worth it. And, unfortunately, the only way you can now legally own the ScummVM edition is to buy the new version, with the two now bundled together on both GOG and Steam.

That’s the kind of thing that sticks in the craw, especially for those who put in their own time in order to get the game up and running in ScummVM only to now see it sidelined by an inferior commercial product.

It’s probably just a sign of old age, but beyond giving publishers a license to delete and then re-release old games on different generations of console, I’m not entirely sure of the point of remastered titles.

And when it comes to genuine oldies like this one, it seems like a few technical or visual tweaks are hardly going to win over people that would never be interested in the game in the first place, while the rest… maybe just want the old game to be available and functional on a modern OS?

UPDATE [01/07]: GOG have now restored the original ScummVM version to their store, although the previous arrangement of getting both versions for the same price also remains.