Hail Macbeth Brings Shakespeare To Video Games With 1990s Spin

There's an old myth in the theater world that Shakespeare's Macbeth is cursed, and any theatre company who tries to put it on will endure some sort of misfortune during the production. One area that hasn't been tested yet, though, is video games--until now, as upstart Specto Studio, led by a former theater director, has announced Hail Macbeth for consoles and PC.

Hail Macbeth is a third-person narrative adventure and an adaptation of the classic Shakespearean play, where players will assume the role of an "unseen force" guiding Macbeth through the story. They will work against what the official announcement calls "the witches," which are "embedded into the game’s UI, subtly revealing or obscuring information, shifting perspective, and distorting reality in ways that make players question the limits of their control."

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Unlike the original work, this version of Macbeth will be set in an alternate version of the 1990s, with castles, corporate high-rises, and “industrial ruins." The game's script, however, will retain the exact wording from Shakespeare's original work, and the studio has scanned real-world costumes and props into the game in order to "achieve a sense of lived-in reality."

Specto Studio is led by Paolo Sacerdoti, a former theater director, and the team is made up of "an elite team of game-industry veterans," with games like Detroit: Become Human, Horizon Forbidden West, Hellblade 2, Alan Wake 2, and The Last of Us listed among their previous projects. The studio previously worked on Roseline, the first-ever interactive theater experience in Italy, in 2018.

Hail Macbeth is scheduled to launch in Q1 2026 for "consoles and PC," with more information due "in the coming months."