You may just have read about an incident recently when a mediocre comedy film managed to draw the ire of the world’s most insular country, and was subsequently removed from theatres. Now video gaming has its own version of The Interview.
Well, sort of. Developer Moneyhorse’s 16 bit sidescrolling shooter Glorious Leader! was in the middle of a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign when the project came under attack from hackers in a small-scale version of the high profile Sony hack. This has now lead Moneyhorse to cancel the Kickstarter and abandon the project.
“As many of you know, over the holidays we were victims of a hack inspired by the attack on Sony,” the studio writes on its Kickstarter blog. “The hackers destroyed data pertaining to Glorious Leader! and other projects we had in development and locked us out of our own computers and wesbite. The timing couldn’t have been worse as it hampered our ability to attend to the Kickstarter project. We realize that we also made mistakes in our pledge levels and rewards. It is now evident that our funding goals will not be met, so we are cancelling our Kickstarter campaign.”
As for the identity of the hackers, Moneyhorse believes them to be amateurs copycatting the recent Sony hacks. “We have NO reason to believe that this was done by the GOP or anyone affiliated with North Korea,” they wrote last month when the attacks occurred. “It appears to be an opportunistic copycat, as we have been the target of hacking attempts in the past. And we stress that, despite what the message says, there is NO chance that our backers information has been compromised.”
Whether Glorious Leader! would have made its campaign goal of $55,000 we’ll never know (it was cancelled at just over $16,000), but it’s a minor tragedy that we’ll probably never see a game that features Kim Jong Un trampling people on a unicorn. For shame. Moneyhorse says it will “reevaluate [its] commitment” to the title, which doesn’t sound particularly promising.
