Friends, let me summon my full videogame-expert authority to tell you: Studios don’t like it when you pirate their games. They’re not fans! And fair enough, really. If I found out that someone was filtering all my articles into Athletic Dame Repacks that you had to read off of torrented .iso files, I’d be… mystified, primarily—this is a free website—but also a bit miffed.
That sets me apart from the good folks at Safety Stoat Studios, a small studio that specialises in “innovative games that run on outdated hardware,” meaning Sega Mega Drive/Genesis games released (on Itch.io) in our big year of 2024. Generally, the expectation is that curious players will check them out on emulators, but Safety Stoat recently became aware of at least one entrepreneur who had taken one of its games, packaged it up in seemingly era-appropriate Japanese Sega packaging, and began flogging it for $120 on eBay.
But although you might think Safety Stoat would be upset at someone trying to turn a quick buck off a nicked version of its game, the studio was chuffed. “We have been pirated; we’re a real game studio now!” it declared in a blogpost on Itch. “After 12 games, 2 albums, and a lot of elbow grease, prayers, tears, adrenaline, and cortisol, we have arrived in the space traditionally occupied by industry giants… we now have unauthorized reproductions of our IP showing up in Asia!”
Of course, the people at Safety Stoat are very keen that no one actually drop over a hundred bucks on a samizdat copy of their profoundly free videogame Mythdragon, but they can’t help but appreciate the burnished bonafides. “We could not, in a million years, convince somebody that our game had a rare, Japan-only cartridge release and was somehow worth $120. But, here it is! Free marketing!
“Of course, I would feel very bad if anybody paid $120 for a free game, but I do hope that somebody sees the listing and, perhaps, Googles it to find the game’s real web page.”
To be fair to the faker, the box looks pretty convincing. Then again, that’s mostly because it straightforwardly rips off the boxart for Dragonfire, a real game from 1982. Still, someone went through the trouble to slap some genuine screenshots on the back, gin up a fake manual, and create the cartridge. Points for effort. “The title does look badass and we like the hiragana(?) below, although we have no idea what it says,” says Safety Stoat. In the comments, Mina Harker points out the katakana is a transliteration of Mythdragon: “ミmi スsu ドdo ラra ゴgo ンn”.
Anyway, the Stoat was stoked. “Boo-ya! We win! We’re a real developer now! In your face, homebrew-games-convention-that-shall-not-be-named-that-rejected-all-our-submissions-last-month!” declares the studio by way of conclusion, while also reiterating that you should, under no circumstances, actually buy the dang thing. “It’s less about the copyright infringement and more about our mission. When we release games for free, it’s because the games are supposed to be for everybody. Download our games! Enjoy them! Share them! We hope they make your life a little bit brighter!”
Which is rather charming, if you ask me. I’m tempted to spin up Retroarch and try out Mythdragon—for free—myself.