If you’ve been on the Internet today, you may have seen that the video game listing page on Walmart’s Canadian site listed a handful of upcoming unannounced titles such as Gears of War 5, Just Cause 4, and Splinter Cell by making the games available for pre-order. A few hours later, the listings were removed from the site.
Amongst those titles that were potentially “revealed” was Rage 2, a sequel to the 2011 first-person shooter from id Software and Bethesda Softworks. Rather than choosing to ignore the listing and wait for a full reveal likely at E3, however, it seems that Bethesda has decided to take a different approach and face it directly.
The official Rage Twitter account has recently tweeted its first tweet from the profile and is seemingly poking fun at the Walmart listing. “Hey @WalmartCanada here are a few notes,” states the tweet, along with an image highlighting the problems with the listing for the game. The image cites incorrect key art, misuse of appropriate font, and the lack of an age rating on the box. This picture was also made the profile and header images associated with the Twitter account.
Hey @WalmartCanada here are a few notes. pic.twitter.com/R1od2aTEMC
— RAGE (@RAGEgame) May 9, 2018
Bethesda’s VP of Marketing, Pete Hines, quickly quoted the Tweet himself after it was published and said, “This is why we can’t have nice things.”
This is why we can’t have nice things. https://t.co/ZhOHGsITfp
— Pete Hines (@DCDeacon) May 9, 2018
While none of this is necessarily confirmation of a Rage 2 specifically, the fact that Hines and the team at Bethesda have decided to be so forward with this seems to imply that the game is probably real. If Rage 2 was nonexistent, there would likely be no response from them whatsoever. Bethesda turning this into a joke rather than staying silent instead allows them to continue to get out in front of their own messaging. It’s also just pretty hilarious.
Of course, assuming the game’s existence is real, this makes things a bit more interesting for Bethesda’s upcoming reveals at E3. If id Software is once again the developer of Rage 2 then that means that a sequel to the 2016 release of DOOM will likely not be unveiled. DOOM 2 rumors have been running rampant for the last month — thanks to a quote from Hines in an interview with DualShockers — but it seems that the demon-blasting shooter might not be in the pipeline after all if id Software is instead making Rage 2. Then again, this is all just conjecture considering we don’t know the studios behind these rumored titles and Rage 2 could have easily been handed off to another developer.
Whether or not this is confirmation of Rage 2 or not, it’s refreshing to see a publisher be candid and playful about this situation. If Rage 2 is real, we’ll likely see it formally revealed next month during Bethesda’s E3 conference.