Anyone remember Limbo of the Lost? - What if Lolcows made video games?

Mr. Pickles

Mr. Pickles

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Once upon a time there was a game called Limbo of the Lost, it released as a demo for the Amiga way back when, but did not see a full release until 2007.

(Davidspackage's Let's Play of Limbo of the Lost)

Limbo of the Lost stars Spooner Briggs, Captain of the Mary Celeste, who is sent to Limbo to fix a book that the "Seal of Sufferance" has been removed from. If Briggs can return the seal to the Book of Fate, then Destiny will rule the world, and if he doesn't Fate will rule the world instead. These are all details not listed in the game itself because Majestic Studios (formerly "TriLogik Studios") didn't include the opening cutscene with the game, but instead offered it as a special features bonus on a second disc that has both the intro movie and tons of concept art.

The game upon being released received low scores for being a broken piece of shit with illogical puzzles. No joke there's a segment of the game where you have to fill a green vial with water, which shows up as blue in the bottle, then mix it with saffron (a yellow substance) to make it green, to mimic the color a magic potion and it's not the dumbest puzzle of this train wreck.

Steve Bovis proceeded to make various fake accounts on gaming forums and amazon praising the game under the aliases of being a big fan of the game, a beta tester for the game, and his own daughter.

The stupidity of Bovis resulted in people getting pissed at him, his co-workers leaving the company, and a "fan" remake called "Macarena of the Missing" (https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=2424.0)

Bovis had made quite a reputation for being a dumbass with a huge sense of self-entitlement, bragging about how great he was and even planning a Limbo Of The Lost sequel called "Limbo 2:Flight To Freedom", even posting a job listing for an artist on it.

The second game did not materialize, because the best I must confess, I have saved for last.

If you try to buy a copy of Limbo of the Lost, you'll find it carries a heavy price. The reason for this is because the game was available in Europe for only one year before its American release in 2008 where it was available for only one month.

Steve Bovis often bragged about his art skills and how he hand crafted the world of Limbo of the Lost (called:Keep of Lost Souls) himself, and wow, it's a breath taking experience that takes you back through your favorite games. Everything from Elder Scrolls IV:Oblivion to Return To Castle Wolfenstein. By this I mean Steve's "master artist skills", comprised of taking images from other games and photoshopping them.

I still can't get over this, understand why Bovis thought this was a good idea, or how it took him a year to get caught.

Naturally, the game was pulled from store shelves the second this was noted. It's not just one texture or lifted sound effect which anyone can get away with, but... literally the game is completely composed of nothing but photoshopped images. This isn't someone's Newgrounds flash game, this was put on a DVD and shipped to stores.

When caught, Steve Bovis claimed the art had been outsourced to contractors who did it, contractors who don't show up in the game's credits nor did he ever specify the name of. This contractors excuse naturally came up after an entire year of sucking his own dick for "Making all the art in Limbo of the Lost!"



Some google searches will tell you more. I just wanted to share this with everyone because the whole thing is fascinating. How was Steve Bovis simultaneously so incompetent that he made Limbo of the Lost, while still having the intelligence needed to not only make the game but get it published and actually sold in stores.

There have been many attempts to list all the stolen game footage, and many memes about photoshopping so I won't make a full list of either, but if anyone wants to take a crack at it they can.


Does anyone else have something they want to add onto this? Sadly Steve Bovis' bullshittery and the game itself are obscure and hard to find information on, but I felt if anyone could appreciate this or tell me more, it would be someone at Kiwi.

Edit: Screenshots weren't showing up correctly, so here's where I got the screenshots from - http://lotl.wikia.com/wiki/Backgrounds
 
It's kind of a boring story, really. The game had basically no sales, was boring, broken, and bad, and was pulled after the massive copyright theft was revealed. It's really only noteworthy as a game because it's valuable because it was pulled from shelves.

As for how the game got released, Brianna Wu 'made' a shitty, terrible game by hiring and abusing private coders. It's not hard to get a game made, you just need money, and a point-and-click adventure game weren't hard to make in 2007.
 
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The Manglement said:
It's kind of a boring story, really. The game had basically no sales, was boring, broken, and bad, and was pulled after the massive copyright theft was revealed. It's really only noteworthy as a game because it's valuable because it was pulled from shelves.

As for how the game got released, Brianna Wu 'made' a shitty, terrible game by hiring and abusing private coders. It's not hard to get a game made, you just need money, and a point-and-click adventure game weren't hard to make in 2007.
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The Manglement said:
It's kind of a boring story, really. The game had basically no sales, was boring, broken, and bad, and was pulled after the massive copyright theft was revealed. It's really only noteworthy as a game because it's valuable because it was pulled from shelves.

As for how the game got released, Brianna Wu 'made' a shitty, terrible game by hiring and abusing private coders. It's not hard to get a game made, you just need money, and a point-and-click adventure game weren't hard to make in 2007.
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I didn't think Brianna Wu had anything to do with Limbo of the Lost
 
Mr. Pickles said:
I didn't think Brianna Wu had anything to do with Limbo of the Lost
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No, but she made the much worse Revolution 60, which is what I was referring to. It's not hard to make a game if you have enough money to hire some code monkeys who will work for peanuts.
 
with the classic old lady (?), Cranny Faggot. Also, this sweet song plays at the end.

 
I think one of the few reasons it's notable besides it's plagiarism was because Vinny from Vinesauce streamed it (To hilarious effect). That video is extremely popular iirc, and is still gaining a decent amount of views per month.
 
Lackadaisy said:
"Faggot's the name, cooking's my game!"
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She's a reference to british chef, Fanny Craddock, who cooked between the 50's and 70's. By the 70's a lot of her food was outdated, but after the damage the 40's/50's did to British Cuisine she did a lot of good.

This Limbo of the Lost isn't even the first time they made the game, it was originally a game on...DOS I think? It wasn't more than a demo, but even that version had stolen assets.
 
Never forget just how much shit they plagiarized.

Sable said:
She's a reference to british chef, Fanny Craddock, who cooked between the 50's and 70's. By the 70's a lot of her food was outdated, but after the damage the 40's/50's did to British Cuisine she did a lot of good.

This Limbo of the Lost isn't even the first time they made the game, it was originally a game on...DOS I think? It wasn't more than a demo, but even that version had stolen assets.
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There was this as footage though it was for Amiga rather than DOS.

The fact it was made as far back as the 90's can make one feel this was the dev's own Sonichu.
 
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A Swedish gaming mag, Fienden, interviewed two of the developers a while back: Tim Croucher and Laurence Francis. (They couldn't quite get a hold of the third developer, Steve Bovis.)

Link to the PDF* - the article begins on page 78. (The PDF is divided into double-pages, so you'll need to select double-page 40 of 58.) It's all in borkspeak, but I'll translate a few representative quotes.


"It's the 10th of June 2008, evening. Tomorrow 'Limbo of the Lost' will be released in America. A woman sits by her computer and happens to see that her cohab, Laurence Francis - the man she loves, the man she's had to support for three years while he's worked day and night with a computer game, the man who gave up the pub he once owned for that game, the man who's almost come apart due to the pressure, who has had problems with sleep, mood and alcohol during these three years, the man who's finally finally finally completed it and who's finally finally finally going to reap the fruits of his hard work - has gotten an e-mail.
She asks him if he's going to open it.
Laurence Francis thinks that this is an evening where you can't get anything but good news, and answers 'yes'.
And then, just like that, their lives collapse.
The message doesn't contain any good news. Instead, it contains a question asked by Ryan Lodata - editor of Gameplasma.com and superior of Eric Franck [mentioned earlier in the article] - and forwarded by Tri Synergy [the game's publisher]. Both senders are asking the same thing: 'How do you explain this?' and referring to two attached images.
One depicts 'The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion'.
The other depicts 'Limbo of the Lost'.
And yet, it's not possible to see any difference.
Laurence Francis has no idea how he's going to explain that. His areas of responsibility throughout the development have been music, puzzle design, and screenwriting. The graphics were handled by Steve Bovis, the project's front man and driving force.
So Laurence calls him, and Steve answers that he's gotten the background from a guy in America he knows. And he promises that it's just this one image, and that they can fix this.
Laurence mails his publisher, explains that it all was a misunderstanding, that it was only about a single background and that they could produce something new, self-made, if they just got a few days.
The next morning, 12 new plagiarized backgrounds have been discovered."

[...]

Laurence: "I've acted my whole life, and always been in the center of attention in some way. Tim hasn't. 'Limbo of the Lost' was, for Tim, that big moment in his life when he would finally become something. He would make everyone proud. Himself, his dad, everyone. Instead he was crushed. Really crushed. At first he called me all the time and repeated the same thing over and over: 'how could he do this to us?' 'Tim,' I answered, 'it's over, you must drop it, you must go on.' But he couldn't. And even today he only talks about two things: 'Limbo of the Lost'. And Steve Bovis."

[...]

"'If only I had never opened that book.'
Tim Croucher is convinced there's a curse over 'Limbo of the Lost', and when I look in his eyes it becomes clear he's serious. He really believes this.
The book he's talking about is one of many that tell the story of the ghost ship Mary Celeste - the real mystery that formed the basis for the events of 'Limbo of the Lost'.
[...historical background...]
But Tim Croucher says there are things that indicate that the curse didn't go under with its ship, that it instead continued to affect people who in different ways have become intertwined with its fate. He's convinced that this long chain of horrible events extends through history and into our time, and that the curse - the very moment Tim sat in Steve Bovis's bedroom and suggested that they'd base a computer game on something he's read about a cursed ghost ship - really was transferred to him.
And before you dismiss that as confused nonsense, you should know one thing. Within three months of the release of 'Limbo of the Lost', Tim Croucher lost the following: His house. His car. His great darling. And his best friend.
'If only I had never opened that book', Tim Croucher says. 'If only...'"


(* Yes, that's vintage lolcow Alix Henriol on the cover. Fienden isn't/wasn't a normal gaming magazine.)
 
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c-no said:
Never forget just how much shit they plagiarized.


There was this as footage though it was for Amiga rather than DOS.

The fact it was made as far back as the 90's can make one feel this was the dev's own Sonichu.
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Ah, Dark Id. Your sacrifice will be remembered.

thedarkid made a let's Play of this game back on Something Awful I think, but it's archived here: https://lparchive.org/Limbo-of-the-Lost/

If you're a fan of my Let's Sperg threads, I try to style mine after his, so enjoy. If you're not a fan, well, he's still pretty sweet. The Dark Id is also responsible for those Let's Plagiarize vids.

There's also one on the RPGnet forums by Wields Rulebook Heavily, found here: https://forum.rpg.net/showthread.ph...Limbo-of-the-Lost-(warning-Picture-intensive)

And no, before you ask, I am NOT doing this one, no way, no sir. Not unless someone can provide me a copy, or at least a way to download this thing. And even then, no. I am totally not going to okay I'll do it if someone helps me get it.
 
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