Limbo Of The Lost - An Astonishing Tale

A quite remarkable story has emerged about a PC adventure game from Majestic Studios called Limbo Of The Lost. It has, it is alleged, entirely lifted locations and art from at least five other games, apparently proven in a number of screenshots posted by GamePlasma yesterday. Oblivion seems the main target, along with Thief 3 and others. Because, hey, who bought those games? But this is a larger story of peculiarity.

The development of Limbo Of The Lost has been talked about for over a decade, the first announcement of its release finally appearing in 2006 when signed to G2 Games. The press release oddly chose to boast that it had been in development for more than ten years. A lot more than ten years if the following statement is true.

"Originally created as a graphical/text adventure game for the Atari ST and then a traditional point & click game for the Amiga CD32/A1600."

Not too sure there were many text adventures for the ST kicking around in 1996. Nevermind that the A1600 wasn't an Amiga model at all.

Skip ahead two years and the game has released the vaguest of releases via G2 at some point in 2008. According to Adventure Gamers,

"The game's European release through G2 Games late last year resulted only in a few copies available through eBay or from a small Asian retailer, casting doubt about the legitimacy of the release."

By 7th May, US publisher Tri Synergy announced that they would be publishing the game in N. America (including the feature, "Immersive (being there) sound effects"). As recently as the 5th June a teaser trailer was released, then swiftly replaced due to failing to meet ESRB regulations with this one:

After watching this, it's not possible to ignore last year's "behind the scenes" trailer developers Majestic Studios put up:

Um, isn't that Poser? And I'm not quite sure you can claim your pencil sketches are an "all star cast". But the most stand-out part of this surely being the name of one of the characters, "Cranny Faggot". What? Sure, we get the spoonerism. But WHAT?

You may wonder why we've not linked to Majestic Studio's website. Well, that would be because it's on GeoCities. It's like there can be nothing about this story that isn't brilliant. Anyway, it's either been whipped down, or overloaded by the attention the plagiarism accusations have brought, and you can fail to look at here.

Right, so the best bit. The screenshots. We don't want to take anything from GamePlasma, and their fantastic discovery, and they deserve the hits they'll be getting for this story. So head over there to see the full selection. But below is my favourite.

Limbo Of The Lost:

Oblivion:

It gets better. Neogaf posters have been spotting loads more, including scenes that appear to be from Silent Hill 4, Painkiller and Return To Castle Wolfenstein, and screen decor from Diablo 2, while at Just Adventure someone has claimed spoken dialogue has been lifted from Rune. A JA poster also spotted this story about the motley crew behind the game.

RPS readers reckon they've spotted more similarities, including further Thief 3 nabs, Pirates of the Caribbean game FMV, and bits from Crysis, Spawn, BioShock, UT2004, and Baldur's Gate, although we can't verify any of them yet. Collect them all!

My favourite is the Thief 3 inspiration, linked in this GR thread:

Thief 3:

Limbo Of The Lost:

Note the addition of the skulls on the shelf. The skulls from Diablo 2.

Tri Synergy have responded, issuing a press release stating:

"Tri Synergy is just as shocked as everyone else is by the recent screenshot comparisons. At no point during our dealings with Majestic Studios up until the point that the comparison was first publicly made by a third party did we have any knowledge of these similarities. Additionally, Tri Synergy will discontinue distribution of Limbo of the Lost in both retail and online outlets."

It's impossible to imagine more won't show up. We're trying to get a copy to see what we can find. If you want to play at home, I've put all 76 available screenshots here, as a 20Mb zip.

For now, let's finish with this quote from an interview with Majestic, as spotted by QT3.

Gordon: So have any more recent games influenced your current project?
Steve: The project is more influenced by film and literature rather than other games, we want the experience to be as original as possible and as such we have made a calculated effort to keep away from other games in the genre. Limbo of the Lost is an experience first and foremost, secondly wrapped up in a game media and genre.

Thanks to Michael for being the first to tip us off to this.

EDIT: I can confirm that it's a real game - no hoax - and that it is a point and click adventure, with a loosely animated character superimposed on static screenshots.

ANOTHER EDIT: Courtesy of RPS reader Joachim, here's a preview of Limbo of the Lost from the June 1995 issue of The One. Page 1 and Page 2.