The Hilarious Way Bethesda Responded To The Apparent Rage 2 Leak

Ahead of E3, gamers, journalists, enthusiasts, and leakers all work their hardest to try to pull any morsel of info that they can from publishers, assets, press packets, and web servers in order to find out about what will be presented at this year's E3. Well, after a supposed leak of Bethesda's upcoming press conference, the company decided to poke some fun at the scandal.

The official Twitter account for RAGE tweeted out an image of the box art that appeared as a placeholder on the store page for the Canadian version of Walmart. The image grades the leak like a term paper, giving it an A, knocking off three points for having incorrect keyart, not having the title of RAGE 2 in all caps, and for missing the age rating from the ESRB on the cover of the box. Techincally that should make it a B+, but who's counting?

The tweet pokes fun at the leak that originally occurred just a few days ago, where some retailers ended up listing a number of games that many expect to be revealed at this year's E3, with Walmart in particular listing Gears of War 5, Forza Horizon 5, Borderlands 3, Just Cause 4, and RAGE 2 among its offerings.

Typically, retailers are given a heads-up about upcoming games so that they can start prepping the pre-order bonus promotions, but sometimes there's also an issue where whoever operates the listings gets a little crazy and starts posting games ahead of their actual announcement. This is what appears to be the case with RAGE 2, the unannounced first-person shooter sequel to the 2010 outing for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC.

The original game was sort of a hybrid of Mad Max meets Borderlands meets Fallout. Players traveled around a wasteland, completing quests, acquiring new weapons, battling enemies, and traveling around in limited vehicle segments.

The big gimmick for the original RAGE was that it was running on the id Tech 5 game engine, which featured the utilization of John Carmack's highly touted megatextures.

While it all sounded great on paper and seemed cool in concept, the application of the tech didn't really do much for the actual gameplay, and in the end RAGE was regarded as a well-intentioned but mostly mediocre outing from id Software and Bethesda.

The funny thing about it is that leak from Walmart wasn't much of a confirmation on its own that RAGE 2 was actually going to be on display at E3, but the fact that Bethesda re-opened the official Twitter account for RAGE seems to indicate that the Walmart leak might actually be more true than some people may have guessed.

For people hoping for more DOOM, it looks like that's going to be put off this time around for a eight-year-late sequel to RAGE. Depending on what id Software does with the game could determine whether or not it's worth getting hyped about, but in the meantime let's all just enjoy and laugh at the hilarity that is the Twitter grading of the leaked box art from the RAGE account.