Square Enix Shuts Down Fan-Made Chrono Trigger Sequel

KIllagouge writes "Just days before the release of Chrono Trigger: Crimson Echoes, SquareEnix sent a Cease & Desist letter to Chrono Compendium to stop everything to do with Crimson Echoes. People might remember when they did this with Chrono Resurrection. Seems to be the growing trend; instead of listening to their fans, which would net them even more money, game developers continue to lock down old gaming IP. A copy of the C&D letter is available online." The fan project had been in development since 2004 and was 98% complete.

Comments

So well-timed.

[Anonymous Coward]

It always seems the "IP"-holder sends a cease and desist letter when the project is nearly done, almost like they want to cause as much pain as possible to the people trying to remake something.

What frustrates me most is that these projects then aren't worked on to completion and then simply distributed by anonymous torrents, working for several years on something and then getting cut off at the last minute is simply a dick move.

Re-making from scratch : Why not, actually ?

[DrYak]

Square Enix has quite a legitimate case here and I understand it much better than if they shut down a project making a game from scratch (eg, a typical PC game).

I don't know well this peculiar ROM hack. But from the length of development time for the project and from the description (Same cast going into completely new adventures), I'm under the impression that they have almost completely redone a new game, creating new characters, writing new dialogues, etc...

Their only problem seems that they slapped all these new assets on the original engine as found in the ROM - the code and the sprites of the original cast are maybe the only thing left.

Given all the work already poured into the project, they could try to keep only the newly created assets.

Perhaps, if the ROM hack is as big as the delay and the information on the website let us think, it won't be that much complicated to remove the latest bit that tie the game to Square Enyx franchise :
- change the trademarked names
- create new sprites for the main cast
- use another engine. Preferably an open source one which is provably free of any S.E. content and can be audited. There are lots of open-source turn-based RPG engine. Given the popularity of Chrono Trigger, probably a couple of them can be configured to be close to that game's mechanics.

This will probably add another 2 years of development. But if this time S.E.'s lawyers clearly state what exactly caused the C&D letter and to what extent modification need to be made to make the project IP-law compliant, then the past 4-5 years that went into developing this will still give a result that the fan community will be able to enjoy.