Limbo Of The Lost Devs Protest Innocence

Spoilers: Limbo of the Lost's Terrifying Ending

Ok, so don't hit play if you don't want to spoil the ending of Limbo of the Lost, the game accused of grand theft assets from a lot of different games. Reader Ryan M. tipped us off to the two videos, the one above and the one that implies that there could be more Limbo in store; over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Kieron Gillen notes that "The pianist is possibly the scariest thing I’ve seen in my life." I'm simply left speechless.

Limbo Of The Lost Creators Made It Themselves

Last week we posted a story about Limbo of the Lost, a PC game from Majestic Studios, who have been accused of lifting large portions of other games and placing them directly into their own. While comments from the developers themselves don't seem to be forthcoming, CVG managed to dig up this little gem from an interview in a local paper with the three person dev team from back in early May.

Mr Francis, a former landlord of The Pilot pub, Upper Stone Street, and now a mature student, said: "It is a sort of comedy come horror. A bit like Monty Python meets Evil Dead. "Between the three of us we researched, wrote, designed, animated, scripted and developed the whole game from home."

Seems like comedy come horror is amazingly appropriate for the situation they now find themselves in. Hit the link for a feel-good story that, in retrospect, doesn't feel quite as good.

Pub pals pin hopes on US game success [Kent Messenger via CVG]

To recap: PC adventure game Limbo of the Lost has been busted stealing art assets from nearly every PC game released in the past ten years. The list of games it stole from - and the way it used said stolen assets - is hilarious. Almost as hilarious as some of the entries in a competition held over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, to see who could come up with the best "mocked up screenshots for other levels that might have appeared in Limbo of the Lost". Who'd have thought Majestic would manage to steal something from Peggle. I've included a few of the entries here, but really, you should check out the full catalogue of entreies over at RPS. Good times.

Compo Of The Lost Gallery [Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

To a certain extent, copying in this industry is inevitable. It's a creative industry, built on ideas, and ideas are mostly built on ideas you like that other people had. A nicer way to describe it is the "creative process". But straight-up stealing assets? To the point where almost your entire game - architecture, UI, the works - is built upon other people's work? Less accepted. PC adventure title Limbo Of The Lost, by Majestic Studios - a real, commercial title (hence the legal issues) stands accused of just this, with an original discovery that some locations in Limbo looked awfully familiar to those found in Oblivion leading to discoveries of other parts of the game lifted straight from Morrowind, Silent Hill and Thief, just to name a few. Needless to say, Bethesda's lawyers are now involved. Tri Synergy - the US publishers of the title - have also told us they've "discontinued distribution" of the game, didn't know about the similarities, and are "just as shocked as everyone else" following the revelations.

Limbo of the Lost stole from Oblivion, Morrowind, UT2K4, Diablo, Silent Hill, more? [Bobby1234SI @ NeoGAF]

Irrational's 'The Lost' Gets the Bollywood Treatment

I love promotional music videos for games, since they're usually so wonderfully terrible they're fantastic. It's even better when there's a weird story attached: GameSetWatch turned up a NeoGAF post regarding the fate of Irrational's cancelled release, The Lost. The game has resurfaced (with reworked graphics, but with core mechanics and story relatively intact) as an Indian release for PCs under the title of Agni: Queen Of Darkness. As GSW neatly sums up, "... evidently this title went south, Irrational got bought by 2K and turned their attention to BioShock, and FXLabs managed to rejigger it for a Bollywood PC release." But that's not all! It even got its own music video featuring Bollywood star Malaika Arora. I'm entranced.

Irrational's 'The Lost' Turns Up... In Bollywood?! [GameSetWatch]

Wired Remembers Futurama's Raiders of the Lost Arcade

Wired's Game|Life posted a fond tribute to Futurama's ubergaming episode Raiders of the Lost Arcade. Most of the piece runs through the show's various jokes (for instance, I never knew that Q*Bert had a line that, when played backwards, translates to "Where can a guy get some pants around here?"). David Cohen, co-creator of Futurama also reveals:

I wrote 'Raiders of the Lost Arcade...The origin of that idea was a whole movie about aliens invading earth in the exact pattern of Space Invaders. I had high hopes, but the feature idea got chopped down to five minutes.

Land of the Lost