Earlier this month Take-Two quietly removed all official references to their XCOM first-person shooter, prompting speculation that the game had been secretly rebranded over the course of its long development. We still have not received any confirmation on the game’s status, however, a new viral video has appeared online that has added fuel to the XCOM rebranding theory fire.
The short video (embedded below) was posted on April 18th under the “News & Politics” category on Youtube, and features a shadowy figure talking about the meteor that hit Russia. The connection to Take-Two comes from the website’s source code, which contains the phrase “whathappenedin62”. This phrase happens to match a domain registered by Take-Two Interactive earlier this year.
Take-Two has also sent out at least one strange package to VideoGamer, which suggests that the company will re-announce XCOM in the very near future.
Exactly what XCOM is being rebranded to, if that is in fact what is going on, is unknown. Superannuation has recently discovered other Take-Two domain registrations (specifically, thebureau-game.com), which indicates that the new title could be The Bureau.
XCOM was originally announced in 2010 with a March 6, 2012 release date but was later pushed back to Take-Two’s fiscal year 2013 (sometime between April 1, 2012 and March 31, 2013). In May 2012 2K Games announced another delay for the title’s release window, moving it to an unspecific “fiscal 2014″ launch date — sometime before March 31, 2014. The last official statement about XCOM from Take-Two came on February 5, 2013 during the publisher’s last earnings call. At that time the company reconfirmed the “fiscal 2014″ release window, and noted that 2K Marin was still making progress on the title.
It seems pretty clear that Take-Two is on the verge of making an announcement, and all the evidence points towards it being related to the XCOM shooter. We will keep an eye out for any official information from the publisher and let you know as soon as anything is announced.