Yes. Yes. Yes. One of the most influential films in terms of tone and setting for dystopian futures, Blade Runner is coming back. Ridley Scott is going to direct some kind of sequel to the 80s classic and I, for one, cannot wait. Blade Runner was so influential in late-80s and early-90s anime and Japanese videogames that a modern incarnation of the film has my imagination going wild. How in the world will they top such a stunning visual masterpiece like the first one? They can’t be derivative, because they set the original story. One of my favorite games for the Sega CD and Sega Saturn was a little title by an unknown game designer called Hideo Kojima. This game was Snatcher. Indeed, when I first saw Blade Runner I thought it was Snatcher the movie because my exposure was to that game first, then the movie upon which much of it is based. After seeing the film in its various incarnations, I can easily see why Hideo Kojima was so enthralled with the ideas presented in the film. In a future world humans send human-like replicants to far flung reaches of space to perform their dirty work. Sometimes these replicants develop an identity and existential understanding of themselves, thus become a danger to normal humans who are genetically and physically inferior to these replicants. Blade Runners are those people sent to hunt down these ‘rogue’ replicants and kill them. In Snatcher, the world has been decimated by a massive virus and the future is limned in the trappings of Blade Runner while positing an alien menace that is akin to a body snatcher instead of a human-like replicant as in Blade Runner. Really, the two are so damn similar in tone and setting that it is very hard to draw distinctions between what is the film and what is Hideo Kojima’s early 1990s masterpiece. If you haven’t seen Blade Runner or played Snatcher, I recommend you do either or both as soon as you get some free time.