Fortune’s Run is a sci-fi immersive sim about surviving the industrial wreckage of Earth after humanity has escaped to the stars. The shooter RPG blew some critics away when they tried the demo back in 2023. Now the early access game’s future has been plunged into uncertainty after its developer revealed they’re going to prison.
The creator of Fortune’s Run, who goes by Dizzie on Steam, announced Tuesday night that their past had caught up with them. “I’ve been sentenced to prison for the next 3 years,” they wrote on the game’s Steam page. “It’s a long story, but I’ve lived a very different life before I was a game developer, and I wasn’t living very well. My case is about 5 years old now, I have been going through the legal process the whole time I’ve been working on this. I have finally been found guilty and sentenced, and I’m going away next month.”
Fortune’s Run has been in early access for over a year at a price of $20. It currently has just over one hundred user reviews with a Steam rating of 90 percent. It’s due to receive more updates and content, but there’s no telling when, if ever, the game will actually be completed at this point. “It’s a shame, but it’s the consequences of my actions,” the developer continued. “I was a very violent person and I hurt a lot of people in my life. Unfortunately, the sentence isn’t going to help with that at all, but I guess we all know that. So the game isn’t TOTALLY dead, but unfortunately due to even further bad things happening, it’s unclear what will happen.”
The game is a boomer shooter take on PC classics like Deus Ex and Thief, with the grimy post-apocalyptic punk visual style of the early Fallout games. It’s mission-based instead of an open-ended sandbox, making it a unique blend of old-school PC gaming sensibilities. Fortune’s Run is the kind of game about which people constantly write things like, “How is nobody talking about Fortune’s Run?” It was already a cult hit with the potential to be a lowkey GOTY-contender whenever it came out of early access.
“I know many of you will be upset and disappointed but please understand that there’s absolutely nothing I can do, these wheels were in motion long before I started making this game and it’s just been slowly unraveling in my face the whole time,” Dizzie wrote. “I want to underline that I’m no longer in financial dire straits since our game actually sold OK, so I should be able to afford rent once I get out, so there’s a chance that if you wait a few years I’ll be able to cap off the release. In fact, there’s not very much content left to work on, I’ve been making stubs and prototypes of the missing levels in my spare time.”
Before going to prison, the developer left players with one last update. It includes new missions, story sequences, puzzles, objects in the environments to interact with, and “hundreds upon hundreds of bug fixes.” However, it’ll break players’ existing saves and there’s no one to QA it. It’s unclear if Dizzie will be communicating with fans again before development goes on hiatus or if this is the last communication for some time. The game remains available to buy on Steam.
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