What Would Matt Do

(I have no idea who made this image, but if you see it and want credit, just let me know. It’s goodness)

If you pay attention to the intarwebs, you’ve heard of Limbo of the Lost by now. I first heard about it two or so days ago, when the story broke that Majestic Studios may have stolen some artwork from Oblivion. By may have, I mean it’s obvious that they did and in a very brash, uncaring manner. They essentially took screenshots of whole rooms in Oblivion and put them in their game. Yeah, I agree, that’s pretty ballsy. Don’t get fooled though, these guys have much bigger balls than that.

Following the story from there, it appears they’ve stolen assets (and not just art but audio) from many games. RPS says:

It gets better. Neogaf posters have been spotting loads more, including scenes that appear to be from Silent Hill 4, Painkiller and Return To Castle Wolfenstein, and screen decor from Diablo 2, while at Just Adventure someone has claimed spoken dialogue has been lifted from Rune. A JA poster also spotted this story about the motley crew behind the game.

RPS readers reckon they’ve spotted more similarities, including further Thief 3 nabs, Pirates of the Caribbean game FMV, and bits from Crysis, Spawn, BioShock, UT2004, and Baldur’s Gate, although we can’t verify any of them yet. Collect them all!

That’s just pure awesome. This game wasn’t some mod released on fileplanet and never seen again, this is a product you can go to EB and buy on the shelves. Well, maybe you can:

Tri Synergy is just as shocked as everyone else is by the recent screenshot comparisons. At no point during our dealings with Majestic Studios up until the point that the comparison was first publicly made by a third party did we have any knowledge of these similarities. Additionally, Tri Synergy will discontinue distribution of Limbo of the Lost in both retail and online outlets.

I don’t really know what to say to/about Tri-Synergy. Should they have noticed that the game used art from multiple AAA titles all over it’s game? Yeah. Should they be punished for not realizing it? I don’t know. But I can almost guarantee they will. By copyright law, companies have to pursue and defend their copyrighted materials. Going to be interesting to see the fall out of this to say the least.

As you might expect though, that’s not the whole story. You see, this game has been in development since the early 90’s apparently. It used to be a text adventure set to go on the Amiga. The Amiga. This game has been in development longer than DNF (I didn’t even know that was possible).

The whole thing is just amazing. It’s stunning that a game made it all the way to store shelves having so obviously copied artwork from multiple places. It’s pure awesome that Majestic studios thought they could get away with this. They are most obviously crazy:

Apparently, the developer has been pretending to be a player of the game on various adventure forums telling everyone how incredible the game is. Then he sent a review copy to one of them, and the reviewer helped out someone who was stuck in it. Then the developer pretending to be a player started ripping into the reviewer for letting hints out, and then posted as himself, the developer, supporting himself pretending to be a player.

Then… they figured out the "player" and the "developer" were the same person by seeing that their IPs were the same… so the developer said that it was a beta tester and posted as a player without his knowledge.

It’s not the first time something like that has been done on the internet, but if you add that in with all of the other stuff…. I can’t honestly can’t wait to hear more about all of this.

Live this incident up ladies and gents. We may not ever see another release of a game filled with so much insane all at once. We may not see such a blatant rip off mixed with balls the size of sun in our life times. As AC/DC says, "[...]we’ve got the biggest balls of them all."

What Would Matt Do: I really have no words to explain this. It’s utterly awesome. I eagerly await the behind the scenes and the fallout. This is already an awesome trainwreck. Lets see what happens when they poor oil on it (go to trial, dig up details, etc).