Silicon Knights has been ordered to destroy all games they have with Epic Games’ code in them. OK, so nobody had much in the way of an emotional attachment to Too Human, or X-Men: Destiny, but still, that’s got to sting. And it may have accidentally revealed a project whose loss might really sting.
For those unfamiliar, Dennis Dyack’s studio Silicon Knights, which put out the classic Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem and Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes back in the early 2000s, and then didn’t publish a damn thing worth playing since, lost a lawsuit against Epic Games for, essentially, not bowing down to the genius of Dennis Dyack.
Yeah. They lost, and had to fork over $4 million in costs.
But they also have to destroy, essentially, every game that they were working on. And a curious title has popped up in the middle of that.
As part of the loss, NeoGAF members have turned up that Silicon Knights has been ordered to destroy any unsold game with Unreal code in it: That is, anything Silicon Knights has made since 2005.
This also includes games that they’ve been working on: Siren In The Maelstrom, The Box/Ritualyst, and… The Sandman.
Granted that this could simply be a working title or a concept but it seems a bit unlikely. Warner Brothers has been investing heavily in video games and The Sandman is one of their premiere titles, up there with Batman and Superman in the “crown jewels” department. That makes them lawsuit-happy.
Similarly, Warners has been trying to push its characters, all of its characters, into other media. Sandman would actually make a lot more sense as a video game than a movie, for various reasons, and really, Eternal Darkness is a great argument for Silicon Knights to develop it.
Of course, X-Men: Destiny is a great argument against. But we’ll be curious to see what might emerge as this unfolds.