Chalk this one up as “wishful thinking” if you like, but reports out of East Europe suggest S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 may not be ready for burial just yet.

Stalker-GSC.ru has got hold of a statement attributed to GSC World owner Sergei Grigorovich, but wouldn’t vouch for its authenticity.

“I realized that this concept of the STALKER will not be of interest to many players and decided to [cancel development],” it says, according to auto-translate.

“Announcement will not be shown instead, all that the team managed to do without me. STALKER brand into the hands of Bethesda Games. I’m leaving the game development.”

Bethesda has nothing to say on the matter, unfortunately.

In December, Grigorovich apparently announced that he would close GSC World, ending S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2’s development.

Official information has been hard to come by, and although it was clear former staff members were working hard to try and keep the project alive, the team admitted this week that it had not been able to secure the rights to the game.

Subscribe to the VG247 newsletter Get all the best bits of VG247 delivered to your inbox every Friday! Enable JavaScript to sign up to our newsletter

So. Who has them? Dunh dunh dunh.

Thanks, Kotaku.