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Blizzard has rights to Redneck Rampage

Hillbilly shooter to be revived? No.

A minor fuss has been kicked up by IncGamers' discovery that Blizzard has acquired the rights to, of all things, Redneck Rampage.

The coarse 1997 PC FPS, built on the Duke Nukem 3D engine by Xatrix and Interplay, featured hillbilly brothers in the town of Hickston aiming to save their prize pig from an alien invasion. It had two sequels (expansion packs, really), and also boasted an early example of paid downloadable content - the one-dollar "cuss pack" which added swearwords to the audio.

IncGamers speculated that this might be Blizzard's recently-revealed fifth project, currently being prototyped using the World of Warcraft engine.

However, it's also possible that the rights have simply fallen into Blizzard's lap like an inheritance from an estranged great-aunt. Interplay sold the Redneck Rampage rights to Vivendi Games, points out Big Download, which owned Blizzard before merging with Activision to become Activision Blizzard. The rights passing to an entity called Blizzard Entertainment Holdings may simply be an after-effect of the merger.

That certainly seems more likely to us, especially when you consider that Blizzard hasn't worked on anyone else's intellectual property since it made Justice League Task Force for the SNES and Mega Drive in 1995.