2026 has already been one of gaming's busiest years. Thousands of new titles have been launched in the first half of the year alone, as Geoff Keighley confirmed at Summer Game Fest. It can be easy for a game, even a massive game, to slip through the cracks, and you may not even have noticed we passed the weekend without Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra slapping another release window on itself.
As per IGN, the game isn't going to try and squeeze itself into the pre-GTA VI launch window, nor will it jump to the end of the year, either. Instead, it's going to release in 2027 at the very earliest, which will be six years since the game first revealed itself to the world.
Shawn Kittelsen, senior vice president at Paramount Games Studio, confirmed the game still exists, and that it's playable in its current state. "It's playable. I've got my SpongeBob controller here, but it's on my hard drive right now. So I can go through and play the build. We're continuing development on it, but Amy and the team have big ambitions for the level of quality that they want to hit," he said.
"They are a relatively small team considering the AAA quality that they're delivering. What you've seen in previous footage is what the game looks like, and we're making it with a fraction of the resources that you see on other AAA games of the same type, and really trying to push a new development model that's a lot more responsible and sustainable."
Kittelsen said that he's hoping Amy Hennig's team at Skydance New Media can avoid the "disruption" gaming has seen over the last few years, but there's a lot of trust at Paramount placed in Hennig's team. Kittelsen said "we're giving them the time to cook."
Let's hope the final result is worth it, but we'll only know for sure when the game launches.