5 Video Games That Seemingly Stole Pieces From Other Games
Good video games have detailed models, high-quality music, and beautiful textures. And sometimes that stuff's easier to copy than to create. The most extreme way that goes is full-fledged "asset flips," like when you see a game about Air Bud trying to kill Clifford the Big Red Dog Shadow of the Colossus style, or an unauthorized sequel to Half-Life 2.
On other occasions, however, assets go on marvelously incredible journeys that land them on games from respectable companies ...
Dante From DmC: Devil May Cry Has The Trippiest "Where Are They Now?" Story
Few people enjoyed 2013's edgy reboot of Devil May Cry. Though it was actually pretty good on a technical level, players hated the new lore so much that even the character model of DmC's revisioned Dante (called "Donte" by the haters) found himself out of a demon hunter's license and had to find another job – in a different game.
While the reason why anyone would want a disgraced anime-tier demon hunter whose hair isn't even white eludes us, we'd like to believe that Capcom sold him under a clause forcing the character to get murdered in gruesome fashion. So, in the likely case that you hate DmC, you'll be happy to find out that Donte gets mauled to death by a soda machine:
This is what happens when you say, "Yeah, Pepsi's okay."
But, if you're one of the rare few who like him, then shh, don't worry. He's actually totally living his best life filming dental videos in Vietnam:
Dentists may cry.
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Games Can't Stop Rebranding Nazi Imagery
Do you know who was really into hijacking and rebranding stuff? The Nazis. Meaning they probably would have liked Call Of Duty: Warzone's rebranding of this one banner, especially since the COD devs reused something that came from Nazis to begin with. And no, we're not talking about "came from Nazis" as in a game about Nazis, like Wolfenstein, but real-world Nazis.
Activision
That's not even a logo only found in Hitler's secret doodle book, but the banner of the Azov Battalion, a group of Ukrainian Nazi LARPers used in the ancient times of back in 2014.
Don't get us wrong. In the scale of coolest things to do with Nazis, stealing from them is up there … but only if you're not stealing their imagery and adjacent message in a way that will normalize them. Weirdly, the devs behind the game claim they have no idea where that goddamn ugly-ass thing came from.
Sadly this isn't unique to this game. In 2017, Bungie, the makers of Halo and Destiny, had an armband that looked just like an alt-right flag.
Activision
??
Luckily, Bungie was cool enough to acknowledge the problem and remove it.
Nathan Drake is the greatest (male) treasure hunter in video game history. He's stolen countless artifacts from every continent populated mostly by non-white people, the lives of thousands of NPCs, and the hearts of players everywhere. Drake's greatest achievement, however, was stealing from an entirely different game series. And no, we're not talking about Uncharted ripping off Tomb Raider. This is about the developers at Naughty Dog stealing beautiful artwork from Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag.
Ubisoft
If you look carefully at the trailer for Uncharted 4, you'll see that they not only lifted the artwork directly from the Creed of Assassins, they even removed the pirate from the picture for undisclosed reasons.
Ubisoft, Naughty Dog
Sony was quick to take down the trailer following complaints, and Naughty Dog both replaced the artwork with another piece of (hopefully) not stolen art, and this kind of thing hasn't happened again since. But that's not the first time that it has happened.
The Naughty devs at Naughty Dog did the same thing for The Last Of Us when they stole the most precious piece of abstract art known to man, a personal redesign of the Boston subway map, which had been done by a then-unknown artist.
Naughty Dog
Naughty Dog was once again quick to apologize, and the whole thing got settled out peacefully, which means they probably bought the guy off with a subway pass.
Sony Keeps Promoting Stolen Assets
Solbrain: Knight of Darkness is an adventure about a young hero who seemingly sets out to appropriate art and music from other games without permission. Let's take a look at its poster:
Lightning Game Studios (Vanished company)
And let's take a look at this beautiful piece of art from a random DeviantArt page:
Despite going mostly for JRPG aesthetics, the game also aimed at addressing the needs of Western RPG players, or at least that's what we make out of seeing how they seemingly stole entire pieces of equipment from Skyrim.
Lightning Game Studios, Bethesda
Solbrain wasn't made by a huge company, as evidenced by said company vanishing as soon as the controversy arose, but it had a very unlikely promoter. Usually, such a game would only have caught the eye of YouTubers frantically scraping the bottom pages of app stores looking for crap games to make fun of, but this was shown off on the official Sony PlayStation YouTube channel.
The internet managed to salvage the trailer even after Sony deleted it in response to criticism. By the looks of it, we could say we got it straight out of a landfill, and you'd believe it:
Everything that's not an apparently stolen asset looks like it's from the PS2 era. This sparked discussions regarding Sony's dubious quality control, which the company worked on … for two years, maximum. We say that because, in 2019, Sony launched an ad for PlayStation Japan composed entirely out of animation ripped off from other artists.
This compilation directly compares all the instances of theft below:
It's like Grand Theft Animation: Playstation-Man Into the Plagiarismverse.
A Lot Of Resident Evil Assets Seem Familar
If Resident Evil 4 weren't one of the most beloved games of all time, it wouldn't be so widely available that you can play it even on a Zeebo. That's not a nonsense word we just made up, but an educational console released in 2009 that's probably not even as powerful as the original PlayStation.
Because of that, It's especially disheartening to find out that the people who got the ball running on the survival horror genre by copying the works of George A. Romero are not as original as we'd previously thought. Artist Judy A. Juracek filed a lawsuit accusing the devs of RE4 of stealing a lot of textures from her awesome artbook. It could be just a huge coincidence, sure, but the visual comparisons are pretty damning.
Judy A. Juracek, court documents
It's an even bigger coincidence that the RE4 devs picked some of the exact same filenames that the original artist had on the cd, which originally contained all the textures. Juracek claims that Capcom used at least 80 of her pictures for Resident Evil 4 and Devil May Cry without asking for licensing.
Judy A. Juracek, court documents
But hey, this took place nearly 20 years ago! Maybe Capcom has grown! Oh--
They could have at least traded the guy the rights to Dentist Donte.
Top Image: Sony Interactive Entertainment
