Turns Out Announcing Tomb Raider Remasters Without Obtaining Permission is a Bad Idea

[Shawn Zipay]

About two weeks ago, a tweet went out by realtech VR saying that they were working on remastered versions of the first three Tomb Raider games. They said that these remasters would be coming to Steam and would be free updates to those who own the originals. It was even going to have a bunch of visual improvements such as SSAO, up to 16x AA (though that's arguably quite generic in this day and age), and 60fps gameplay (original game was 30fps).

Visual overhauls and OpenVR support on the PC? Hey, not bad, right?

Well, it turns out they never got permission to do this. Rather, realtech VR says that it's a "bit more complicated" than that and that they were working for Square Enix. A now deleted tweet, indicates that realtech VR had pitched the idea to Square Enix and then made the announcement before it was ever actually approved by Square Enix.

"We've received an official letter from Square Enix. TR3 Mobile, and PC ports is cancelled. The demos we've sent were not good, interesting enough for them. All our Youtube videos have been taken down."

Right now, realtech VR says that they will instead focus on new Augmented Reality projects for iOS and VR on PC. This came in a follow-up tweet to the aforementioned deleted one. Hopefully their next announcements will be for approved projects moving forward.