HardwareGeeks.com - Thieves and Scoundrels!

Posted by: Rob Liu on Thu, Jun 12th, 2008

You may have heard that “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” Well, the creators of the PC game Limbo of the Lost went even one step further than imitation, outright stealing layouts, backgrounds, items, and anything else they could lay their electronic mitts on from what is rapidly turning out to be a LOT of media from the last decade. The hijacked material was first brought to the internet’s spotlight courtesy of a review from Gameplasma, showing environments that may have been ripped directly from Bethesda Software’s The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Enterprising internet investigators have taken to scrutinizing the game’s promotional trailers and have uncovered evidence suggesting that the cut-and-paste wizards who threw this game together may have also stolen assets from Diablo II, Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004, Silent Hill 4, Painkiller II, and other game titles. For those not quite familiar with these titles, to parallel this in the movie industry, this would be akin to somebody stealing backgrounds/layouts/scenes/etc. from Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Pirates of the Caribbean, and X-Men and then cobbling them together to create his own movie.

Limbo of the Lost is billed as a point-and-click 2D adventure allowing the player to take control of Captain Benjamin Briggs, a real-life captain who vanished with his family, crew, and ship in the 19th century. His ship, the Mary Celeste, was found drifting emptily in 1872, the fates of its passengers a mystery. The game was supposedly in development for ten years or more by Majestic Studios, but after seeing all the different sources that this game took as somewhat more than inspiration, one begins to question whether they were simply trying to acquire such a wide range of stolen material that they hoped nobody would notice when it was all mashed together. Sadly, the game is actually divided into chapters with somewhat thematic environments, so the assets stolen from each game generally end up in the same chapter.

It’s rather amazing that anybody thought they could be this brazen and actually pull this off without anybody noticing. It actually appears that the “employees” of Majestic Studios may have temporarily accomplished just that, however, as they all went “on vacation” after the completion of the game and nobody, not even the game’s publisher, has been able to reach them since. Nevertheless, Bethesda’s legal team is now on the case and there will assuredly be further developments. Additional screenshots for comparison and discussion can be found on a forum thread at NeoGAF. Many thanks to Kotaku for the original heads-up.