Rumour Superliminal may have stolen concepts and full sequences of unreleased Valve prototype

[TioChuck]

During a interview in the MinnMax Show, Lunchhouse Software Tristan Halcomb reveals that some concepts and a specific sequence from the Epic Exclusive game Superliminal are a direct ripoff of the unreleased FSTOP prototype from Valve.

You can hear the quote here:


if the timestamp doesn't work, he talks about the game at 12:10 mark.

 

[sauce]

Oof that's not the best look if they weren't the ones to work on that part themselves. On the other hand, better that it's out there in the world than left rotting on a hard drive in Valve's offices?

 

[Mivey]

Well, who knows whether they actually worked on Fstop, after all Valve allows everyone to work on everything, and I could see them being people who wanted to do an actual game from these mechancis and as they kept getting shot down, they simple set out on their own.

 

[TioChuck]

Well, who knows whether they actually worked on Fstop, after all Valve allows everyone to work on everything, and I could see them being people who wanted to do an actual game from these mechancis and as they kept getting shot down, they simple set out on their own.

as I understand, they never worked at Valve, they had access to the source code of the Source Engine just like the guy in the video, thats how they knew what FSTOP was.

 

[Mivey]

as I understand, they never worked at Valve, they had access to the source code of the Source Engine just like the guy in the video, thats how they knew what FSTOP was.

In the video, the guy said he heard rumours they were Source Engine developers, which would make them Valve devs too and I just wanted to point out that Valve doesn't really put their employees in a box, everyone can in principle do what they want. So it's not hard to imagine that they were closely involved in actually implementing those FSTOP mechanics originally

 

[Alextended]

If they actually worked on that game at all, this guy would probably know. No?

He clearly says they "know things they shouldn't" and that he's only "heard rumors" they were source developers indicating it might even not have been at the same period the game was being worked on. Even if they were source developers, that doesn't really justify it, assuming things are as this guy says they are.

That would be like some fresh ex-valve studio releasing an adventure game now and Campo Santo folks saying it basically recreates sections of In the Valley of Gods 1:1. Having been engine developers or otherwise getting to see Campo Santo's work alongside everything else at Valve wouldn't make it right. Ah well.

 

[Mivey]

We lack details about how these people were really involved with Valve, and when. So I am reserving judgement on this.
And frankly, it's hard to think of this as "stealing" when Valve sat on this stuff for over a decade and essentially gave up on it. I also don't think anyone (let alone a company) should have intellectual rights on abstract ideas, which is what this stuff is. We are not talking about a functioning game with levels, and puzzles. It's a bunch of code and essentially tech demos

 

[Wok]

I have not watched the full video yet, but is there proof of the allegedly stolen sequences? Like, can someone make a Youtube video showing the original sequences and their plagiarized versions?

Edit: This is the doll-house level. I don't want to watch the full video because the game looks interesting, and it would be a spoiler. If the trick is that you manipulate a doll-house in which you actually are, as a mise en abyme, then I don't think it would be very convincing, because I have seen this concept in a prototype which was shown by someone unrelated to Valve or Superliminal at IndieCade Europe a few years ago. I think it is a concept which is not too hard to come up with when you think about manipulating scales, etc.