Friday the 13th: The Game

WOOT!

SINGLE PLAYER CHALLENGES!

Releasing next week!

edited 21st May '18 11:39:42 PM by CharlesPhipps

The update is out today at 4:00 Eastern.

(May 24th, 2018)

[Deleted]

edited 11th Jun '18 4:08:30 PM by CharlesPhipps

FUCK!

Friday the 13th is dead as a game due to the Victor Miller lawsuit.

http://bloody-disgusting.com/video-games/3503558/legal-claim-brings-indefinite-end-new-friday-13th-game-content/

I'm not a scholar in terms of franchise ownership by any means, but I'm thinking that this guy is in the wrong here.

That's shitty. I know a bunch of people were pumped for the Jason X content.

The Single Player Challenge basically was a whole new Friday the 13th game.

4-6 hours of original content and allowing you to play out Parts 1-5.

It was pure awesome and loads of fun.

And like THREE WEEKS LATER, this happens.

head desk

I don't understand how this allows him to interrupt production on a video game.

Did they mean he wasn't consulted, or contacted?

He claims that he owns a portion of the Friday the 13th intellectual property.

The Summer Camp, Jason the boy who drowned, Pamela Voorhees, and Crystal Lake in general.

Basically, the game was lisenced through the film company who owned the rights (Paramount?). Since the legal battle is arguing that Paramount DOES NOT own the rights to the film series, the writer does, the lisence wasn't theirs to give out and he can rescind the lisence to Gun Media and prevent them from using the Friday the 13th property.

I do think that, should the writer get the property rights back, it would be in Gun Media's interest to see if they can come to an agreement with him. Maybe something along the lines of 'Can we finish the DLC we had planned and then end production'?

That's at least my understanding but I could be wrong.

edited 11th Jun '18 6:40:13 PM by InkDagger

It's a bit more complicated with Victor.

Because he only wrote the original Friday the 13th and didn't come up with the name or the premise, which already were licensed by Sean S. Cunningham who was the guy who came up with both as well as the man who acquired the license back from Paramount. Sean is notably the people who licensed the F13 game. There's also the fact Jason Voorhees the killer was created for Part 2 not Part 1 and he got his iconic mask in Part 3, which Victor has no involvement in.

Famously, Victor said that "Jason Voorhees being a killer is stupid. Jason is a boy who drowned."

A lot of fans are asking them to, instead, license the Hatchet series since Kane Hodder and other horror movie folk made it because Friday the 13th had been caught up in legal troubles and they really wanted to make a Friday movie (sort of like how Arnold wanted to star in a bond movie for True Lies).

I Twittered them to contact Tim Seeley about making a Hack/Slash game.

edited 11th Jun '18 9:28:57 PM by CharlesPhipps

So there's a theory going around that the devs just got lazy and decided to shut down the game and run off with the backers' money, and just used the lawsuit as an excuse, essentially making the entire game a huge scam. Thoughts?

Was there a pattern of "laziness" observed in the studio?

A lot of updates were buggy, I know that.

I feel like this is a bit late in the game to pull a 'run off with the money' scheme. Especially if they already said that they'll keep supporting it patch wise.

If they were just planning to run off with the money, why do the Virtual Cabin 2.0? Why do it at all? It doesn't make sense to put all that work in just to run off.

Generally speaking you run off with the backer's money before you spend it. The idea that they are running away with the backer's money after delivering a game, paying Sony and Microsoft all the associated fees and what not to have the game patches hosted and what not, and support it for a year leads one to question if the people who think the developer's are running away with the money understand how much making video games cost?

EDIT: I don't know what disappoints me more, the fact that some of the game's userbase are sending death threats to an old man and his family or that when Gun Media tells them not to do it they criticise them for it.

edited 14th Jun '18 1:39:01 AM by Shaoken

Intersting piece of knowledge gained from all this, but apparently Larry Zerner, best known for Shelley, is an entertainment lawyer who took the time to explain the whole situation. Long story short, he notes it's frustrating for fans but to hold out and relax a little. This lawsuit doesn't affect the existing content such as the films and that he pointed out it was probably inevitable that Victor Miller would want to reaffirm his ownership, given how much money the series has made. Overall, he noted that neither party is in the right and that unfortunately, the only thing that can be done right now is to wait and hope something good comes from all this.

Long time since anyone posted, but it looks like Victor Miller won the court battle, although the judge declined to analyze whether the rest of the franchise is affected.