Sometimes we miss the boat on Vanish/Doom. For those unaware though, this story is an interesting ride. This weekend, during the massive Microsoft leak that hit the press hard, a RPG video emerged entitled “Crucible.” Crucible was initially thought to be a Sega title, but in a turn of events it was revealed otherwise. Hit the jump for the full story and the video.

Sunday, the world exploded and oozed news goodness all over the media. For the few active gaming sites there was a slew of anxious activity surrounding a variety of Microsoft press leaks. The leaks were the result of a survey that was published. The part that should concern the RPG enthusiast in this mess entails a video simply named “Crucible.”

And as you can see, it is an extremely early build of what appears to be an RPG.

Some astute observers ran to the trademark office and checked up on the name of the title. After a bit of digging, Sega’s The Crucible: The Evil Within trademark from 2007 popped up. That then led to the speculation that it was the “secret project” that Sega and Too Human developer Silicon Knights were working on. We can blame that bit of conjecture on both hyper journalists and Denis Dyack, who spilled the beans on the project not-so secret project on an IGN podcast awhile back.

With the new information of what this mysterious video could be, MTV Multiplayer Blog writer Steven Totilo e-mailed Sega. Sega representative Steve Groll fired back with this statement:

“That video is not the game that Silicon Knights is creating for us. I have no idea if it is a game they are working on for someone else, but it’s definitely not the project that Silicon Knights and SEGA are producing. I can’t reveal any info about the game we currently have in development, but I can tell you that it is not titled ‘The Crucible.’ More news about our game coming soon.”

Kotaku picked up the ball on the story today. According to an anonymous Kotaku source (which could either be a hotdog or a human) the “Crucible” footage is the work of Big Huge Games. It’s a notable developer because last year Oblivion designer Ken Rolsten joined the studio. Also the source had this to say about the game:

According to the source, the footage that was leaked on Sunday represents an “absolutely archaic build, and doesn’t even come close to representing what the game is or where it’s going” calling it “orders of magnitude better” than the footage suggests.” - Kotaku

To make matters harder for both the journalist and starving RPG enthusiast, the title isn’t due out until 2009. That is, if this is actually THQ’s title.

We’ll keep rolling updates as they come, folks. It’s the least we can do.

[Via Kotaku and MTV Multiplayer Blog]