Elements of Shadow of the Eternals were created at game developer Silicon Knights and were sold to new developer Precursor Games, Wired has learned.
Currently raising a round of crowdfunding, the proposed PC and Wii U game is a "spiritual successor" to the 2002 game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, created by Silicon Knights in collaboration with Nintendo for the GameCube. Developer Precursor Games is headed by Paul Caporicci, who was laid off from Silicon Knights in July of last year, and its chief creative officer is Denis Dyack, the founder of Silicon Knights.
Last year, Kotaku reported that Silicon Knights was working on a pitch for an Eternal Darkness sequel. When Precursor unveiled its teaser trailer for Eternals last week, some forum posters quickly pointed out that one of the monsters in the trailer was a dead ringer for concept art from an unspecified project that a former Silicon Knights artist had placed in a portfolio.
"We did purchase some art assets from Silicon Knights," Precursor Games CEO Caporicci told Wired via phone this morning, "and we were very happy to be able to put those assets created by the talented past employees to use."
Caporicci said that Precursor Games then "assembled and did all the rest of the work in CryEngine 3 – totally new engine."
In November 2012, following a drawn-out court battle with Unreal Engine maker Epic Games, Silicon Knights was ordered to pay over $9 million in damages to Epic, destroy unsold copies of games built with Epic's technology and also to destroy any game code that it had created using Unreal Engine.
Besides saying that Precursor had acquired art assets from Silicon Knights, Caporicci said he could not comment on Silicon Knights. "From my experience in July, I was laid off from Silicon Knights with a number of other people and I was saddened, you know, that we were going to go our separate ways," he said. "And so I started reaching out to other people and seeing if they were interested in starting something brand new."
While Shadow of the Eternals is not officially related to Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, Precursor's crowdfunding campaign has made no bones about the "spiritual successor" angle and the fact that Dyack and others who worked on the original are at the core of this new project.
Nintendo, Caporicci says, owns the rights to Eternal Darkness. "We've been in constant communication with [Nintendo], and they've been supporting in working with us to put the game on [Wii U]," he said. "They even wished us luck right before we launched the campaign. So we have a great relationship with them, and we'll just see where that goes from here."
When Eternal Darkness was released, Nintendo patented its "sanity meter" game mechanic, which displayed more and more surreal hallucinatory images to the player as his character's level of sanity was lowered.
Caporicci says Shadow of the Eternals can implement similar "sanity effects" while not infringing the patent. "I think you've seen other games borrow that idea – Batman [Arkham Asylum] had it, for example – so I think there's a lot of flexibility for us to be able to take themes from that," he said.
Precursor Games is running its own crowdfunding campaign rather than going through Kickstarter. Caporicci told Wired that because Precursor has no U.S. or U.K. presence, it cannot participate in Kickstarter, but he is hoping this can be somehow resolved soon. While Shadow of the Eternals has a fundraising goal of $1.5 million for the first of 12 episodes, it is off to a slow start, having only raised about $118,000 as of this writing. Caporicci says that the company is open to other funding if the current campaign does not generate enough cash from fans.
"We will explore any avenue to make this game a reality," he said.
