Paradox ARG hints at Vampire: The Masquerade-related announcement in March

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Dating app ARG continues to tease something Vampire-related.

Paradox's dating app alternate reality game, Tender, has continued its vampire-related teases and promised a big announcement on March 21, which has us more excited than ever at the prospect of a sequel to, or remaster of, Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines, the 2004 RPG. 

Tender is a "soulmate algorithm" that asks your blood type before inviting you to match with sick people near you. Romantic, right? The hints that it could be linked to the Vampire: The Masquerade universe—which Paradox has the rights to after buying White Wolf Publishing in 2015—have intensified in the past week. Take, for example, this clip from a recent Tender livestream, which shows Santa Monica Pier, one of the key locations in Bloodlines.

Then there's this memo from Tender CEO Malcolm Chandler, which also happens to be the name of the author of a book called Vampire Brides from Planet Hell. The memo contains plenty of vampire-related references, such as "thrall", "regent" and "hunter".

The memo, send to Tender's chief technical officer, says: "We must be ready for San Francisco on March 21st. 300 Tender users will be invited to a private party, some of them flown from around the world...This will be the biggest announcement in the history of my company." As GameInformer notes, this year's Game Developers Conference takes place in San Francisco, March 18-22. 

We still don't know what any of it means, but it's clear that's something afoot. No doubt we'll find out more over the next month.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.