ZeniMax Canceled Project Blackbird Leaks in a Brief In Engine Video as Insider Sources Verify the Footage
A short clip from ZeniMax Online Studios canceled Project Blackbird has surfaced online, offering the first public in engine look at a title that was quietly positioned as the studio’s next major swing beyond The Elder Scrolls Online. The footage was first shared by eXtas1s on X, then independently verified as legitimate by Insider Gaming, which reports the clip was used internally to showcase lighting running on Unreal Engine4.
👀🔥 LEAK ⚡️
— eXtas1s 🎮 Noticias & Rumores (@eXtas1stv) January 18, 2026
Nuevo metraje de "Project Blackbird", el MMO de Zenimax Online cancelado hace meses por Xbox.
Qué ganas le tenía 🥺. pic.twitter.com/4Nz1G22l2F
From a reviewer lens, the clip is more of a technical tease than a real gameplay reveal. It is extremely short, it looks like a controlled showcase rather than a slice of mission flow, and it does not give enough signal on the core pillars that would have defined Blackbird moment to moment. The bigger strategic question is not whether the leak looks exciting today, but what it represents: a rare glimpse at an online shooter project that was reportedly deep in production planning, then abruptly removed from the roadmap during Microsoft’s July 2025 cancellation wave.
Insider Gaming also notes uncertainty around the engine trajectory at the time of cancellation, since the leaked clip is tied to Unreal Engine 4 lighting. That leaves open whether the project remained on Unreal Engine 4 through its late stage internal milestones, whether Unreal Engine 5 migration was underway, or whether a transition was planned but never completed.
Project Blackbird has been a long running point of speculation because it was framed internally as a new IP with meaningful scale. Public reporting across the last few years has repeatedly pointed to a multi year development cycle and a team size in the hundreds, with a target window discussed as far out as 2028, which maps to the kind of long burn AAA online pipeline Microsoft was building across its portfolio.
The cancellation also had a clear human impact. Insider Gaming reports that the Blackbird shutdown was tied to layoffs impacting roughly 300 developers and it contributed to the departure of studio president Matt Firor, a major leadership shift for the team behind The Elder Scrolls Online.
While the leaked clip itself does not show enough to evaluate the gameplay loop, earlier reporting about the project described a third person online shooter framework with players as Revenants, bio enhanced operatives working for alien syndicates on Soteria, a remote tidally locked planet with harsh environmental extremes. Story framing was described as a conspiracy driven arc that escalates through criminal and corporate ladders, anchored by a murder investigation thread.
Post cancellation, the Blackbird fallout appears to be seeding new studios, with multiple groups formed by former developers, signaling that talent and ambition did not vanish, it redistributed.
Meanwhile, ZeniMax Online has publicly pivoted its forward momentum back into The Elder Scrolls Online, including a shift toward a seasonal model and positioning future updates as free content drops, a major structural shift for the live service cadence.
If this brief clip is all we ever see, it still raises a sharp conversation for 2026: how many promising online projects die in the gap between internal excitement and corporate risk tolerance, and what does that do to the creative and technical evolution of the genre?
What is your take on the leaked footage: does it look like an early prototype that could have evolved, or does it feel like a concept that never found its identity?
