During Take-Two Interactive's Q2 2022 earning's call, it was announced that a $53 million dollar project had been canceled. It was later discovered the Take-Two Interactive project was a game codenamed "Volt" that was in development by Hangar 13, the studio behind Mafia 3.
The initial news of the cancellation was brought to light by Mike Futter on Twitter. The following day, Jason Schreier provided further illumination about the project and the studio behind it.
Hangar 13 is a development studio based out of Novato, California with satellite studios in Brighton, England, Prague, Czech Republic, and Brno, Czech Republic. The company was formed in 2013 following an announcement from 2K Games that Rod Fergusson would be running a new San Francisco studio. Ultimately, Fergusson left, and on December 4, 2014, 2K announced that it had finally set up the new studio, Hangar 13, under the leadership of Haden Blackman. The company's first game was Mafia 3 which was released in 2016. In 2020, Hangar 13 released Mafia: Definitive Edition which contained a remake of the first Mafia and a remaster of Mafia 2, developed by d3t.
Early in June, news broke on project "Volt" as it was part of a leak on Reddit involving Take-Two Interactive and 2K Games' upcoming lineup. Based on the initial information from Reddit user u/swine_flu_greg that was later corroborated by Jason Schreier, "Volt" was described as "Cthulu meets Saints Row." At the time, the game had a logo similar to that of the Fallout series and was in a fairly unfinished state. Older sources claim the game would be an "open-world sci-fi title with supernatural elements."
An open-world sci-fi game with a Saints Row vibe and heavy Lovecraftian influences is a unique concept There is no end to the number of possibilities of what could have been. That being said, Take-Two Interactive may still decide to do something with the IP in the future.
There are many reasons a game may not see full development. It could be that the project was too ambitious, they ran over budget, or the publisher decided to reallocate resources elsewhere. It is possible that a post-mortem on why may be given after some time has passed, mostly due to the large price tag affixed to it. At least the staff at Hangar 13 doesn't have to worry about layoffs following the announcement. It's one thing to see a project that has had so much effort put into it vanish, but it's another to lose employment because of it. Here's hoping their next project sees the light of day.