Nachimir

Limbo Of The Lost: EPIC FAIL

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Limbo Of The Lost is/was a point and click adventure game made by three guys in England, and it turned out to be made from lots of screenshots from other games. Many are slightly photoshopped, like this one from Thief 3 that has skulls from Diablo. The website for it was hosted on Geocities and is gone. I'm astounded they managed to get it all the way to retail thinking noone would notice :fart:

GamePlasma broke the story, but the best source I've found is this Neogaf thread, because they keep on finding more games that have had assets ripped.

The first to come to light was Oblivion, but following it have been UT2K4, Diablo, Silent Hill, Thief 3, etc, etc. Threads are turning up on forums like BeyondUnreal saying "Hey this is ripping off our favorite game", and Neogaf is collecting them.

Edit: RPS ran a competition to photoshop the main character into more games, resulting in these fine entries:

http://i31.tinypic.com/2u7wrp2.jpg

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/june08/limbocompo/AlexRyan.JPG

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/june08/limbocompo/Lacero.png

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You mean it wasn't done in a "post modernist" kind of way? They just totally ripped off the graphics...?!

I wonder if the finished game was any good. Is there a final copy out there somewhere?

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Yeah I was following this story; absolutely hilarious. I laughed all the way through the Neogaf thread. Check out the trailers on Gametrailers. The game would have been mildly hilarious anyway just because of how bad it is. It looks like 1995.

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That's mean to 1995 Dan, it looks like an abortion of a game from 1995 :P

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I wonder if the finished game was any good. Is there a final copy out there somewhere?

It got published then withdrawn. Apparently, a few copies have been floating around on eBay.

OH MY GOD thank you for mentioning

Dan. It's like a really bad mashup of Knightmare made with animators who've only ever seen 70s TV shows and voice actors who been in solitary confinement for a decade. I especially like the half-hearted attempt at shadows; they're bad photoshoppery in motion.

We may not have found the Citizen Kane of games yet, but this is definitely their Plan 9 From Outer Space :tup:

Edit: Quote from Neogaf: "This feels like the climax of Act 1 of the internet."

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It made me think of the videogaiden cgi soap opera thing.

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I can see the developers being Ed Wood types who only want to get their vision out at whatever the cost.

I wonder if any locations weren't stolen from other games...

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Ohhhh dude, I remember now seeing that trailer on Gametrailers and thinking it looked so weird and bad that I really wanted to play it! If I can scoop it up for a song I'd do it. Any Ebay links?

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Well you can watching the into sequence here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d089tmk-bAc&feature=related

Lol, it looks terrible! But I have to say, considering this was done by three guys, it could look a lot worse! (Did they pre-render all of the bits with the characters talking?! That must have taken some time and not be exactly disk space efficient...)

Watch behind the scenes, if you dare!

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Holy shit! They TOTALLY ripped those graphics. Wow. That's some balls.

From the Just Adventure review:

"Every game has an interesting story behind its development but I am willing to bet that very few, if any, match the one behind Limbo of the Lost (LotL). Development started way back in the 90s, originally for the Amiga 1200, then for the CD32 and eventually crossed over to the PC. Being an avid adventurer as well as devoted Amiga user in the 90s, it is in utter embarrassment that I admit that I never caught wind of this game back then and it was only a few years ago, during its PC development, that I found out about it."

http://www.justadventure.com/reviews/LimboOfTheLost/LotL.shtm

Wow.

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This just gets better and better. Steve Bovis send a "Worldwide Exclusive" copy of Limbo of the Lost to GameBoomers.com. When one of the staff there gave a hint to the solution of a puzzle in the game... well Bovis wasn't happy.

Check out justice in all its glory (nicely handled, GameBoomers! :tup:):

http://www.gameboomers.com/forum/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=233736&fpart=5

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Sorry, one more:

http://www.kentmessenger.co.uk/paper/default.asp?article_id=9644&slide_id=1&newspage=2&searchkeyword=&searchpage=1

(I'm just absolutely fascinated by this!)

And here's a gallery of just about every theft:

http://www.shacknews.com/screenshots.x?gallery=10039&game_id=2754&id=121070

The opening video which shows a guy falling down a tunnel of flames is from the Spawn movie. Amazing.

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Oh goodness, I've been reading this long thread (the NeoGaf one, there was some Remo in there too!) all day. It's almost unreal, but I can't stop laughing at how real it actually is.

I mean, come on, the Spawn movie and Beetlejuice promo art?! Holy crap!

One other thing I found funny is Just Adventure gave it a B before any of the plagiarism business came up. Just more proof that there's nothing more lacking in credibility than a Just Adventure review.

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So, the game is not done by three guys but by three guys and a bunch or unwillingful collaborators, awesome!

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Well, you know, there's a school of thought that says plagiarism is something lawyers made up to make money from artists. If any of the people who ACTUALLY MADE the graphics they stole are upset, then fair enough, but I reckon they couldn't give two hoots.

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Bethesda are "looking into their options". I expect the rest of the plagiarised developers will just watch on while Bethesda's hounds tear them apart. It should be fun! There won't really be much left to go round in terms of compensation, but I'm sure they will be made an example of.

edit: oh, you mean for instance, the individual environment artists at Bethesda? Who can say. One of the comments on this story I read pointed out that Oblivion was mostly made with middleware and procedural generation anyway :P

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OK, I take it all back. After watching the ending sequence on Youtube I now realise that the poeple who made this game are comedy geniuses,a lthough maybe not for the reasons they hoped:

part 2:

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Did they just take screenshots from the other games to use as backgrounds, or actually rip out the 3d environments?

EDIT: I laughed so hard at that ending sequence my liver was forcibly ejected from my torso and is even now jigging by itself in the middle of the room.

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And here's a gallery of just about every theft:

http://www.shacknews.com/screenshots.x?gallery=10039&game_id=2754&id=121070

I love how they credit Oblivion and don't even dignify Limbo with the title to the gallery.

I watched the making-of and my gods, someone needs to curb this exaggerated advertising lingo.

I'll give them permission to use the words "Real-time shadows" and "Graphics", but "All star cast of characters"? What does that even mean?

edit: I got to a point in that gallery where I tried to guess the game each screenshot was based on. Quite fun.

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Did they just take screenshots from the other games to use as backgrounds, or actually rip out the 3d environments?

It seems they just took screenshots. The characters are badly superimposed over the top.

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OK, I take it all back. After watching the ending sequence on Youtube I now realise that the poeple who made this game are comedy geniuses,a lthough maybe not for the reasons they hoped:

part 2:

WTF

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