So this was a neat game being made by an independent developer, and it was a first person RPG. It’s vaguely doom-like (the game even uses levels made in a Doom editor!), but with a whole inventory and magic system and it’s very very ambitious.
Unfortunately their publishing deal fell through right as they were planning to release, and they weren’t able to release it. So this game never had a retail release, even though it was complete, and had had a demo in PC Gamer.
But apparently they had sent out some pre-order or review copies before the company went bankrupt? And one of those copies got pirated. So it was playable, but only if you pirated it. For years it was this weird warez-only release. The developers didn’t even have rights to it, so they couldn’t even make it freeware…
Until 2013. They got the rights back, they released it for free, and even open sourced it.
There’s even some work being done on source ports to let it run on modern PCs without dosbox and with extra features.
It’s a neat, but sad, story. The game feels like it would have been an unappreciated gem back in the day… If it had ever really come out. So it’s a sort of time capsule of a game that never was, at least in it’s intended time and form.
pirates of the caribbean really introduced an eldritch octopus man who kills indiscriminately and torments the dead as their poster villain and then you watch the movies and it’s like, “oh no, actually the worst villain in this series is a small white british man who functions as the herald of capitalism” and that was very very brave of them
U.S. conservatives always talk about creating jobs but get SO MAD whenever anyone mentions banning prison labor like imagine the insane ammout of jobs that would be created literally overnight if companies in your country had to actually employ people instead of using slave labor from people that got caught with weed 10 years ago.