A former Rockstar Games employee has revealed that Bully 2 is real. But, that’s not all.
As reported in Comic Book, the former Rockstar Games employee (whose identity Comic Book has chosen to protect) added Bully 2 to the list of games that they had worked on in the past.
This former Rockstar Games employee described their former work and position in the company as:
“Head of video for the research department consisting wholly of producers delivering internal journalism of 14+ weekly stories, all featuring video, from location shoots and all media sources.”
It seems that their job was to look for media that was year or decade appropriate to the games that Rockstar Games was making. Now, the interesting thing was, they had recorded that they worked on Bully 2, and also Bully 3, both during 2008.
If that year doesn’t ring a bell, it’s the year that Rockstar Games released Grand Theft Auto IV, the one that featured the story of Niko Bellic, and one of the first set in a mirror of our contemporary world, dubbed the HD Universe.
2008 was also the year that Rockstar released Bully: Scholarship Edition, an HD remake for Xbox 360 and Windows, and also a special edition of the game made exclusively for the Wii. The original Bully itself released on the PlayStation 2 two years before.
It was well known that Rockstar intended to make a sequel to Bully, but they hadn’t officially disclosed when the project was cancelled. Several stories with conflicting information actually abound, but we’ll briefly review them to see where this new revelation fits.
One story, covered by GameInformer, claimed that Rockstar acquired Mad Doc Studios in 2008, with the intention of having them make Bully 2. Mad Doc was renamed to Rockstar New England, and got as far as building a six to eight hour vertical slice.
The story is that something changed in the studio’s attitude, which led to Rockstar slowly pulling staff away from the project, even firing employees, until they just cancelled the game.
Video Games Chronicle has a story that Rockstar worked on Bully 2 in 2010, and cancelled it in 2013. This version of the game had some of the story figured out, but the studio wasn’t decided on the exact time period. The reason for cancellation came down to the lack of traction in the project.
It does seem this new source corroborates the original Game Informer story. Interestingly enough, they also allude to a Bully 3, which nobody had heard of until now. So, does this mean that Rockstar was already planning for a trilogy? We may never receive official word from Rockstar themselves, but as former employees continue to fill in the gaps, we may eventually get at least a nugget of the truth in time.
