Eternal Darkness was one of the best games ever released on the GameCube. While everybody else was trying to rip off Resident Evil, Nintendo and Silicon Knights delivered a game that told an elaborate story of alternate history and alternate realities. Then Silicon Knights decided it didn’t need Nintendo, and went on to prove that, yeah, it really did. Now, unsurprisingly, their attempt to cash in on past glory with Shadow of The Eternals is likely meeting with failure.
We’ve already covered why making this sequel is a bad idea in the abstract, and Precursor Games, which is essentially Silicon Knights under a different name, did absolutely nothing to assuage those fears in a recent Reddit AMA.
Why? Because they literally have no backup plan if the Kickstarter doesn’t come together. This is not a good thing to admit, in public, when your Kickstarter is not coming together: Of the $1.35 million goal, Shadow of the Eternals has so far raised less than a tenth of that with eighteen days to go. Not, as we’ve noted, that $1.35 million would even come close to putting together a game like Eternal Darkness, but ouch.
Perhaps this is less than surprising. Silicon Knights is notable more for one of the most ridiculous and ugly lawsuits in gaming history than its games. It essentially sued Epic for delivering them a broken engine, making it all Epic’s fault Too Human was full of bugs and glitches. That suit ended in literally everything Silicon Knights has made since 2007 recalled, deleted, and destroyed and the company owing $13 million to Epic and the Canadian government. Anybody familiar with the company is going to be forced to question how their money is spent in light of this.
Really, if there’s a hope here, it’s that Nintendo cares enough to step in and do something with the franchise. They own the property, and the game is beloved enough that there are many developers who’d love a crack at it. But either way, a sequel is probably going to come from Nintendo, not Precursor.