This one is thin, man, but it has to do with one of my favorite games of all time, while the circumstances of the rumor are just kind of neat and weird, even if it turns out to be nothing. User Few_Interview8222 on the Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines subreddit reported back from a Genitorturers show in Brooklyn, New York. Partway through the set, the band supposedly told the crowd that a VtMB remake is happening.
I haven’t found any corroborating accounts of Few_Interview8222’s story, but Genitorturers undeniably played at Brooklyn’s The Meadows as part of their “Live + Lewd Tour” on October 15, which puts them in the right place at the right time. We’ve reached out to both rights-holder Activision (one of several, it’s complicated) and Genitorturers’ representation, and will update this story if we hear back.
Why would an industrial metal band started in Orlando in 1986 have this information?
In addition to a killer score by Rik Schaffer, Bloodlines featured wonderfully era-appropriate licensed tracks from metal bands—they were mostly used as diegetic music in the nightclubs and bars of Los Angeles. The Genitorturers track Lecher Bitch was the pitch-perfect theme of The Last Round, a downtown LA dive bar frequented by the Anarch faction of vampires.
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What if they’re wrong?
Multiple commenters on the Reddit thread point out that this could have been a confused, untimely, misinterpreted, or all of the above reference to last year’s Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. You could easily imagine a concertgoer mishearing something in that context, or a performer fumbling delivery of the exact information. It’s the sort of almost-but-not-quite thing you might expect from an artist with tangential awareness of a secondary fanbase they picked up over the years.
A VtMB remake is also the sort of project you could see getting pingponged around between various actors and stakeholders: started, stopped, shopped around, etc. It’d be a situation ripe for collaborators on the periphery acting on outdated information.
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What if they’re right?
Rad! I think? It’d depend on who’s doing it. More and more, I’m beginning to distrust anyone not named “Nightdive” when it comes to commercial remasters. See also: The recent Shogun 2 debacle and the fate of Deus Ex Remastered.
Bloodlines is such a wild, janky, PC gaming package that Nightdive is the only studio I’d trust to not only do a remaster right, but also to bring on legendary modder Werner “Wesp5” Spahl, the man who’s been keeping Bloodlines alive with one of the most impactful unofficial patch projects in gaming. A more ground-up remake would offer equally daunting challenges, like matching the one-of-a-kind mood and look Troika managed to evoke.
Why should you care?
Bloodlines is one of my very favorite games and an incredible RPG that’s well worth your time. To the uninitiated, I like to pitch it as an evolutionary missing link between 2D Fallout and New Vegas. Bloodlines boasts the open-ended design and reactivity of Fallout in 3D for the very first time (Bloodlines leads Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson were senior talent on Fallout 1).
Unlike New Vegas’ wide open world, however, Bloodlines had a more linear, but still loose sequence of zones on a world map to explore. Bloodlines’ Y2K, gothic, noir interpretation of Los Angeles is one of the coolest worlds ever presented in an RPG.
A Nightdive treatment would be my preferred outcome: build on Wesp5’s work and compensate him accordingly, then make it more accessible on more platforms at a modest markup over the original game. Bloodlines 1 can be had for $20 on Steam and GOG, but it’s practically always on sale.
Even if it turns out to be nothing, this is still just a neat, newsworthy little incident to behold—Genitorturers shouting out an obscure, beloved RPG like this 22 years later, and maybe getting a couple genre nerds like me a little too excited on the way.