Eight-year project taken down; Sega had been noted of project years ago
A devoted Streets of Rage fan has taken down his remake of the game at the request of IP owner Sega, reports suggest.
The modder group, known online as Bomber Games, had spent eight years building Streets Of Rage Remake. It was released last week for free, yet days later the download link was removed.
"Sega has contacted us regarding the download hosted on this site,” the Bomber Games founder, whose name is unknown, has said.
In a statement on the game’s forum, he said: “While this issue is being resolved, please do not upload the game for others to download. Any links posted on this site will be removed. Thank you."
The reason why Sega requested removal of the title is unknown. Several years ago, Bomber Games made Sega aware of the project though email correspondence and a formal letter.
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It was thought an informal agreement between the two parties had been reached as Bomber Games continued to work on the project.
The mod consists of 80,000 lines of code, Bomber Games has said.
“It does not use reverse engineering. There is not a single line of code from the original games, as it is all based on visual interpretation techniques, by logic, and by comparison of states.”
The source code is said to be closed to the one project, and would not be used for other games.
Develop has contacted Sega for comment.
It's unfortunate for such a project to end this way really, eight years is a lot of time for SEGA to have acted before now, although im guessing the removal is only disallowing distribution rather than further work on it. Its a shame that the more unscrupulous projects out there who steal copyrighted materials aren't tackled rather than original reworks.
Because removing one link off the internet, is really going to stop the circulation of something, on a global scale... especially something that is reputably, very good.
