Nightdive Studios' ambitious remastering of the 1997 point-and-click adventure "Blade Runner" was originally scheduled for release this year, but was delayed after hitting a mountain of technical hurdles. A new release date has not yet been set.

The developers of the System Shock remake had promised to produce an enhanced edition of the venerable adventure game, upscaling pre-rendered cutscenes, enhancing models and animations, and making this dour classic playable in 2020 The plan was to do just that. Unfortunately, Nightdive told Eurogamer this week that the project's release date is currently "undecided"

due to major problems accessing assets from the original game.

"There were some obstacles we had to overcome in terms of the older technology the game uses," Stephen Kick, CEO of Nightdive, told the outlet.

While Nightdive secured the rights to the "Blade Runner" remaster in December 2019, the team was apparently unable to obtain the source code for the game. Much of the original code was lost when Westwood was acquired by EA in 1998, and even if the files were in a closet somewhere, Kick does not believe EA would be willing to release them.

"Even if something were to happen, it's very unlikely they would release them to us for legal reasons. So we are essentially working with what was in the original game.

With no access to the original Westwood files and no possibility of rebuilding the game from scratch, Night Dive was forced to reverse engineer the game with its own tools. This is made all the more troublesome because of the stubborn basic structure of "Blade Runner," its use of extremely compressed video footage, and the odd quirk of each frame of animation being its own custom-made 3D model, rather than rigging and animating a single character

These are issues that the creators of the fan-made emulation tool ScummVM have been pondering for years; their work is behind GOG's 2019 re-release of "Blade Runner". However, talks of using it as a starting point for the Enhanced Edition were scuttled due to Nightdive's desire for a multiplatform release, which is explicitly prohibited by ScummVM's open source agreement.

Despite the frustrating situation, Nightdive has not given up yet. The developer believes it can still release "Blade Runner: Enhanced Edition" eventually. Kick believes that most of the code work is done, and the team is currently experimenting with how far they can push the rest of the game. Last month's cinematic opening will likely drop the 60fps goal, make it more cinematic 30fps, and add grain.

"We should probably show that next, but I can't say when that will be.