After one Hasbro rep suggested that Activision Blizzard had lost the hard drives that held the code for the well-loved Transformers games it published, Hasbro's PR is now saying that statement was made in error.
At San Diego Comic-Con in July, Transformers fansite Transformer World 2005 interviewed a Hasbro representative about the Gamer Edition line of toys. As part of that conversation, the site asked if the Gamer Edition Transformers might lead to a re-release of the delisted Activision Transformers games, like War for Cybertron.
"Sadly, apparently Activision’s not sure what hard drives they’re on in their building," that Hasbro rep said. "When a company eats a company that eats a company things get lost, and that’s very frustrating. Hope is that now that the deal is moving forward with Microsoft and Xbox that they’ll go through all of the archives and every hard drive to find it all, because it’s an easy Game Pass add. We want those games back up for people to have a chance to play."
Now, Hasbro PR is telling a different story. "To clarify, comments that suggest Transformers games have been lost were made in error," a new statement given to Axios reporter Stephen Totilo says. "We apologize to Activision and regret any confusion. They’ve been great partners and we look forward to future opportunities to work together."
Activision exec Lulu Cheng Meservey, who you might remember from some pretty wild Twitter posts regarding the Microsoft Activision buyout in the past, had an even more explicit statement on social media. "These headlines are wrong. We have the code, it’s not lost and never was."
Speculating too much on the actual truth of this disagreement would probably be irresponsible of me, but I do take a great deal of joy in imagining the terse emails exchanged between Hasbro and Activision PR.
After the disappearance of numerous Activision-published Transformers games from digital storefronts in 2017, IGN reported that the publisher's license for the franchise had expired. These days, those games are still unavailable for purchase officially, and second-hand physical copies have skyrocketed in price.
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