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Register, Others Call Plagiarism in "Limbo of the Lost" Game
Fallen Andy writes "'The Register' has an article describing 'Limbo of the Lost' (developed by Majestic and sold in the U.S by Tri Synergy) which seems to have 'borrowed' copiously graphics assets from other games. Over at the GamesRadar forum there is a thread with some screenshots. Finally, this game has its own Wikipedia entry. Warning to all — move the soft drink away from the keyboard and monitor before you look at
those screenshots. Blatant this is, very blatant indeed."
The original creators of that stuff didn't lose anything, its all bits man.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
It's all screenshots from Oblivion, Thief 3, Unreal Tournament series, Diablo, and other games. Limbo Of The Lost doesn't render those things in 3D but uses it as background image for the adventure game. Really lame that the developers of that game thought they were going to get away with it. I wonder what was going on there, they couldn't find a graphics artist to draw the backgrounds so they just photoshopped screenshots from other games together. Still a bit of a shame for the (if there were any) good points of the game, that are now gone down together with the whole game due to this plagiarism.
I'm guessing the company that made this game will be sued into oblivion
I have nothing compelling to say
Except much shittier... Oh... and YES, I quoted myself!
Three or more, it's research.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
...it is sampling, just like in the music industry.
For example, listen to the opening sequence of Queen's Under Pressure featuring David Bowie. Then, after having your stomach pumped as a precaution, the opening bits of Vanilla Ice's Ice, Ice Baby.
For the Google impaired, here is a YouTube link doing a comparison.
Just equate Limbo of the Lost with Ice, Ice Baby and you will understand. Of course, that would mean Majestic Studios is really Vanilla Ice...
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
... The scene where the protagonist is leaping over barrels thrown by a large orangutan. It's a dead giveaway.
This is the best restaurant I ever eat in
Heh, that's some of the hardest work I've seen gone into plagiarism. That is, outside of academia and Hollywood and politicians where everyone pretty much copies everyone else...
What they need to do now is spend all the money they saved on the artwork on a really good lawyer. One that can stand up in court and say "A layman might think he sees a superficial resemblance" while keeping a straight face.
It's about an adventurer who wanders from game to game to solve the mystery of the plagiarised graphics.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
"Our hope, if everything goes well with the sales, is that within a year we will all be stopping the day jobs and doing this full time."
Epic
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
"everything was re-written from the ground up, everything apart from the initial concept and some character design ...and the rest is history."
"The project is more influenced by film and literature rather than other games, we want the experience to be as original as possible and as such we have made a calculated effort to keep away from other games in the genre."
"All of the game (apart from initial background story and some character designs) had to be re-written, all the characters had to be created in 3D and animated, all the background scenes re-created, all the sounds, coding and music?..basically everything had to be redone or newly created for the PC version. This is not an old game that has been dressed up. This is the original concept, dusted off and re-created."
Also, the game has been in production for 10 years and rewritten few times. I think these guys deserve a "Hard core audacity" award...
Full Article
There are no 'Devs'. This was done by 3 con-men who apparently met a pub. If you dig though some of the links and other forums about this mess you can get more of the pathetic details.
They used an out-of-the-box-create-your-own-2.5D-adventure software and just imported in screenshots from other games. I don't think any of them know a lick about coding whatsoever.
It's amazing that these guys got published when some real independent shops with real talent can't get anything going.
But, based on my understanding of several recent different but similar situations involving movies and music, we can all safely assume that those people would not have bought the game to begin with.
We can also take comfort in knowing that the companies from whom the graphics were lifted probably keep the lion's share of the profit from game sales and the graphic artists make almost nothing, by comparison.
Also, if the guy at 'Limbo of the Lost' bought the game it is his to do with what he wishes because he didn't agree to any stupid 'don't lift graphics' clause and shrinkwrap licenses have never been proven in court anyway so no one has any legal standing to complain about anything. This includes if he wants to make a mashup of the game's graphics and his own cool gaming idea and call it 'Limbo of the Lost'.
And furthermore copyright law has been subverted by corporate interests and is just a shadow of what the found fathers wanted it to be. Copyright is OUR rights not theirs it makes sure WE get the copyrightable content but it has been changed around to give CORPORATIONS all the control. Do I want DRM on my hard drive so I can play a game but keep me from taking screenshots? No! I'll never install Vista. If this was available in WINE I would play it but it isn't. I don't even run NDISWRAPPER!
So, in conclusion, no. I don't think anyone has stolen anything. Information wants to be free.
As in I don't pay anything for it.
(P.S. -- I'm adding some skulls to this comment)
Powell: "So, what are we doing?" Cheney: "Oh, crime." Powell: "Crime? Good, OK... crime..."
...it's OK to pirate this one then??
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
FWIW, "Limbo of the Lost" is a 1990s-era point-and-click adventure game with static backdrops, and those backdrops just happen to be screenshots of other games.
Even if they hadn't plagiarized other games, I can't see anyone buying the piece of crap. Everything about it - plot, graphics, audio, game engine - reeks of amateurism.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Shakespeare did not invent the plots of his plays. Sometimes he used old stories (Hamlet, Pericles).
So, in which older tellings of something like Hamlet can you point to prose such as Shakespeare's "To be, or not to be..." passage? It's one thing to write a game with a magic ring quest plot, and it's quite another to say you're doing something original, and it's just a coincidence that you have characters named Frodo and Gandalf.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Not that I approve. Some people can write code, design game concepts etc but be incapable of drawing pictures. When I look at the photo of the 3 main developers I don't see a picture that looks like three guys that would play typical cutting edge games. They come up with game logic that kinda works but is butt ugly. They hire someone who claims they are a shit hot CG artist, complete with examples of "their" work. This person then proceeds to rip other peoples' work.
The developers are of course stoked by the amazing art "developed" for their game, and give lots of bonuses. Then they discover that they've been sounded robbed, as their game (and their reputations) are soundly denounced.
I'm not saying this has happened in this case, but I've seen scenarios like this before (when I did work in the games industry).
I'm also not saying that this justifies it. If anything it reveals "technology blindness" where the developers are so in love with their own product that they don't bother looking at what else is on the market.
But it's already got Oblivion in it... that's going to be a nasty feedback loop.
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
Antiques Road Show - 2085 AD
Expert: I say, that's a jolly good thing, a shrink-wrapped copy of the infamous "Limbo of the Lost" game!
Owner: Why? Is it famous?
Expert: Well, you see, the creators of the game (and I use the term "creator" generously here) basically stolen static screen shots from a number of other games, and using a crappy adventure game generator, produced this wonder, which they actually managed to get published and distributed.
Owner: So how much is it worth?
Expert: A top-notch undamaged shrink wrapped copy like this would go at auction for at least three million dollars!
Owner: Wow! I mean wow wow wow!
Expert: Indeed...
Owner: So what about this shrink-wrapped copy of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion?
Expert: I'll give you twelve bucks.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
As an example, I am a Game Programmer that doesn't play video games, I just don't have time. I just bought a PlayStation 3 last week for the blu-ray, and it is the first gaming machine I've owned since the SNES.
I'm not saying the developers weren't in on it, I'm just saying the artists at my company could rip off the most famous games ever made and I probably wouldn't know about it.
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
http://209.85.141.104/search?q=cache:GTYHJgCqVCYJ:www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl%3Faction%3Dviewthread%26threadid%3D88482+%22Limbo+of+the+Lost%22+engine&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us I'm still wondering how they were able to import all those assets and levels so flawlessly into their own engine?
That must have been a tremendous job just to write the different converters but then again I don't understand why Steve Bovis, was not able to code a simple CD check into the main menu??? ...this was the follow-up to that question: They didn't.
"Wintermute Engine Development Kit is a set of tools for creating and running graphical âoepoint&clickâ adventure games, both traditional 2D ones and modern 2.5D games (3D characters on 2D backgrounds). The kit includes the runtime interpreter (Wintermute Engine, or WME) and GUI editors for managing and creating the game content (WME tools) as well as the documentation, demonstrational data and prefabricated templates." - http://dead-code.org/home/
All the backgrounds they stole are screenshots from other games. They made a 3D character to move (with scaling) on 2D backgrounds.
Contest to create "screenshots" from Limbo of the Lost: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?page_id=1909
Contest is over, but the entries are hilarious.
Ideas and stories are not copyrightable. It's the execution of the ideas and stories that are protected.
You can take the basic story of "King Lear" and create "Ran". You can take the basic story of "Seven Samurai" and create "The Magnificent Seven". Those pairs of movies share plots and stories but each executes its own vision.
In this case, the problem with the game is that they stole the execution - i.e. the art - used in other games, not the story.
"Even for Slashdot, that was a very obscure reference!" - Anonymous Coward
The thing I like the most about the article is that the it specifically states the NAMES of the morons that thought they could get away with this.
All to often, articles simply list the name of the company in question, and the people actually behind the theft(I consider it theft) hide behind that, thus circumventing any real lasting public derision.
The article destroyed any credibility these idiots may have had in the gaming marketplace, and rightfully so. A simple Google search by potential employers/investors will be all it takes to bring up that article.
Back to McDonald's with you, fryboy!
Bonus points for referencing a plot that Kurosawa borrowed and a plot that was borrowed from Kurosawa.
I mean, it's not as if any gamers would know such obscure titles as Diablo II or Oblivion or Unreal Tournament or anything...
I can just hear the designers now...
"We'd have gotten away with it, too... if it weren't for those darn kids!"
...is call it a parody and its all legal! Brilliant!
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
I have no idea what 'zeitgeist' or 'petard' mean, but I'm gonna attempt to address your post anyway.
I don't know if the intention of his post was really to call "those people" hypocrites. If I had to define his point, I'd say that he is simply trying to show "those people" that the arguments they often use are, at best, questionable justifications that, in another context, seem rather ridiculous.
For example, you seem to be saying (and forgive me if I misinterpret) that in one context, we have a company making money off of another companies work, and that's wrong. But it's not so wrong for an individual to use or acquire a companies copyrighted assets without compensation because that individual won't profit from it. Never mind that said company could be losing profits because of it. Never mind that it doesn't belong to that individual, regardless of how insignificant they feel their actions are. I mean, where's the line, and what gives this individual the right to draw it? But there's no use in arguing, as the OP pointed out, there are a dozen or so ways for the individual to justify it to himself, and in the process trick himself into thinking he's some kind of freedom crusader, saving the world from the evil corporations that *gasp* want to charge us for things, even when most of us secretly know he/she just wants free stuff.
In the end, as an observer, I guess I've always just found the pirate's reasoning to be a little self-serving. It's always been so easy to call corporations evil, controlling bastards intent on ripping the public off. It's a lot more difficult to ask yourself what your personal responsibility is, what your true motivations are, and what your self-serving justifications say about you. Maybe there is something hypocritical about a thief that steals from thieves.
But I can't think about that now, I have definitions to look up.
The trick was that they completed the game before seeking a publisher. If you seek out a publisher with a completed product, chances are you will find a deal there. The reason more developers don't do this is because the operating costs of funding the development of a game are so high. Not many people can fund a number of full-time employees out of their own pocket for the duration of a games construction.
These guys didn't have to worry about operating costs because they stole all their art assets and used a free-ware engine.