Magrunner Devs Craft Their Game With Love


Magrunner Dark Pulse is one of my favourite crowd-sourcing pitches: a first-person puzzler set in the future, only with Cthulhu Mythos. They explain: “In the near future of 2050, a handful of brilliant young citizens are chosen by the Gruckezber Corporation to enter the Magtech deep space exploration training program. What begins as the opportunity of a lifetime soon descends into madness and cosmic horror!” So it’s Lovecraft vs Portal. Yeah. Anyway, it’s been a while since we heard from them – the project was funded last summer – but now they’ve sent word that they’ve launched a shiny new website, complete with a devblog which will apparently be regularly updated with information about the project. Expect more information soon, via the magical medium of an RPS interview. In the meantime, there’s a glimpse of gameplay footage here.

14 Comments

  1. 12/04/2013 at 17:27 RedViv says:

    What is behind this mad time that keeps throwing games at me which seem to be tailored so particularly to my interests?

  2. 12/04/2013 at 18:11 ScubaMonster says:

    So is it inspired by the Cthulhu mythos, or are they using it outright? Sounds like some unnecessary legal trouble if they are using Lovecraft’s material straight up. Edit: Just checked the site, yep, specifically references Cthulhu and Lovecraft. Then again, there’s that Cthulhu indie game on Xbox Live. I don’t know who owns the rights to Lovecraft’s material.

    • 12/04/2013 at 18:19 Jim Rossignol says:

      Isn’t it out of copyright now?

    • 12/04/2013 at 18:20 darkChozo says:

      The Cthulhu mythos is by and large public domain, which is part of why everyone uses it. The only exception is Call of Cthulhu, which is trademarked because of the RPG.

      • 12/04/2013 at 18:42 TillEulenspiegel says:

        To be clear, Chaosium’s trademark on “Call of Cthulhu” really only means that you shouldn’t name your game Call of Cthulhu. The entire content of the story is still public domain.

        It’s generally agreed now that the copyright to all of Lovecraft’s work has expired, but this is more recent than you might think – Wikipedia suggests that they only expired in the EU in 2008.

        • 12/04/2013 at 19:03 Shuck says:

          It’s a bit more complicated than that, as, at least in the US, as his post-1923 work is still potentially under copyright. There’s no indication that the copyright was renewed when it should have been, so it probably went out of copyright decades ago. That hadn’t stopped various entities from laying claim to it, however, in the past. And Chaosium has their trademark claim, which they’ve previously used to force TSR, for example, to remove a Lovecraft section in Deities and Demigods (which clearly goes beyond preventing the use of “Call of Cthulhu” in the title). What a mess.

          • 13/04/2013 at 08:56 Arglebargle says:

            Chaosium didn’t ‘force’ TSR to remove those Cthulhu references. They just asked for an acknowledgment of their claim. TSR decided (apparantly) that they didn’t want to mention any competitors and pulled those Chaosium related sections on second printing. What a mess….

    • 12/04/2013 at 18:54 ChrisGWaine says:

      Within his lifetime Lovecraft encouraged other authors to make use of the Cthulhu Mythos.

      • 12/04/2013 at 20:04 RedViv says:

        This made Derleth rather happy, but has been widely regarded as a bad move.

        • 13/04/2013 at 09:06 Arglebargle says:

          Not always, if you like cultural remixing of ideas. There’s a reason that the Cthulhu mythos is enjoyed and used by fans and authors everywhere. Part of it is the lack of artificial barriers. I think Derleth was just pleased that Lovecraft was not being forgotten.

        • 14/04/2013 at 01:04 G_Man_007 says:

          I got it. ;)

  3. 12/04/2013 at 20:00 BooleanBob says:

    Whatever happened to Eskil Steenberg?

  4. 13/04/2013 at 10:01 garisson says:

    This game is so smexist.