Post by Morreion on Oct 16, 2012 15:22:58 GMT -5
The Game Archaeologist: The curious case of Lost Colony (Massively)
...As players started to investigate the heck out of Lost Colony, evidence that something fishy was afoot began to pile up all over the place:
The game was unheard of prior to November 2006 but was supposedly launching two months later.
The company was asking players to plunk down $20 prior to launch, with a subscription fee following the initial 30 days of play.
Nobody was reporting from the beta.
The screenshots and videos were extremely basic. No gameplay videos were released.
Some players claimed that the visuals were pulled directly from the Torque demo.
GameSHOUT (which Red Planet also owned or was associated with) was embroiled in an underhanded lawsuit with Valve over website domains.
Players accused the company of faking Lost Colony forum member numbers and accounts.
It was proven that the company licensed models from 3DRT and posted them on the Lost Colony website as actual in-game visuals.
Red Planet's mailing address and phone number seemingly had nothing to do with the company itself or its location.
The studio was developing this for three platforms at the same time? Really?
The company was accepting credit card information non-stop.
As December 2006 rolled into January 2007... nothing happened. Lost Colony did not launch, the website remained static, no press releases were issued, and the devs remained silent. From my research, I found extremely few press mentions of this game at all, which is very odd even for the time.
I don't remember hearing about this one- fortunately!
...As players started to investigate the heck out of Lost Colony, evidence that something fishy was afoot began to pile up all over the place:
The game was unheard of prior to November 2006 but was supposedly launching two months later.
The company was asking players to plunk down $20 prior to launch, with a subscription fee following the initial 30 days of play.
Nobody was reporting from the beta.
The screenshots and videos were extremely basic. No gameplay videos were released.
Some players claimed that the visuals were pulled directly from the Torque demo.
GameSHOUT (which Red Planet also owned or was associated with) was embroiled in an underhanded lawsuit with Valve over website domains.
Players accused the company of faking Lost Colony forum member numbers and accounts.
It was proven that the company licensed models from 3DRT and posted them on the Lost Colony website as actual in-game visuals.
Red Planet's mailing address and phone number seemingly had nothing to do with the company itself or its location.
The studio was developing this for three platforms at the same time? Really?
The company was accepting credit card information non-stop.
As December 2006 rolled into January 2007... nothing happened. Lost Colony did not launch, the website remained static, no press releases were issued, and the devs remained silent. From my research, I found extremely few press mentions of this game at all, which is very odd even for the time.
I don't remember hearing about this one- fortunately!
