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[UPDATE] The ‘Friday the 13th’ Game Has Claimed its First Victim
Update: The developer of Last Year has offered an update on the situation, saying “The owners of Friday The 13th feel one of Last Year’s Killer designs looks too similar to Jason so they submitted an IP infringement to Kickstarter to take our page down… I’m changing the mask of that particular character and re-uploading it so we can get it resolved and move forward!”
Jason Voorhees won’t be returning from his decades long vacation from video games for another nine months and he’s already claimed his first victim. Last week, the Kickstarter page for the indie slasher game Last Year was taken down and replaced with a claim of a copyright violation submitted by the rights holders of the Friday the 13th film franchise.
For the unfamiliar, Last Year is an asymmetrical multiplayer horror game that raised a massive amount of money — over $114,000 — on the popular crowdfunding website last year. In it, a team of player-controlled teens is hunted by a masked murderer who is controlled by another player.
The problem with that description is it could also be used to describe the recently announced Friday the 13th game.
There’s plenty room for two asymmetrical horror games about masked psychos hunting down teens, but one look at the concept art for Last Year and it’s immediately clear they’re using F13 as a source of inspiration. The bad guy that’s featured in the art (see above) that was used to raise all that money on Kickstarter could easily be mistaken for Jason.
Crystal Lake Entertainment is fully within their right to protect their franchise, just as the rights holders of the Halloween movie franchise were within theirs when they had Pig Farmer Productions rename their Halloween game to Babysitter Bloodbath.
In this case, there’s a not-insignificant amount of money involved, so I’d be surprised if it’s resolved through a simple name change. I’ve reached out to the developer of Last Year to see if they can shed some light on the situation. Stay tuned.
All of us here at Bloody Disgusting are deeply saddened to learn that George A. Romero Foundation Founder and President Suzanne Desrocher-Romero has passed away.
GARF shared in a statement on socials, “It is with a heavy heart that we announce the passing of Suzanne Desrocher Romero. Suzanne passed away of natural causes on June 24 at her home in Toronto after a prolonged illness.”
The statement continues, “Suzanne was the fierce leader of the George A. Romero Estate and The George A. Romero Foundation. She worked tirelessly to preserve George’s legacy. Her work at the foundation will continue to inspire and live on for generations to come. The family asks for privacy at this time.”
Desrocher-Romero founded GARF in 2018, after her late husband’s passing in 2017, and has been a fierce advocate for his legacy and the arts. It was her mission to “strengthen horror as a serious field of global study,” and she was a tremendous fighter on behalf of Romero’s works and supporting new filmmakers inspired by his legacy.
It was Desrocher-Romero who spearheaded the recovery and restoration of The Amusement Park, and, as the person in charge of the George A. Romero estate, worked closely with author Daniel Kraus on completing unfinished novels like Pay the Piper and The Living Dead. She most recently celebrated the restoration of her favorite of Romero’s zombie films, Day of the Dead, and was hard at work producing the upcoming film Twilight of the Dead.
That passionate advocacy led to Suzanne Desrocher-Romero becoming family to Bloody Disgusting as well.
2023 marked the start of an ongoing partnership between Bloody FM and GARF on The Dead, a scripted audio series spanning multiple seasons that saw Desrocher-Romero working closely with the Bloody FM team and mentoring the series’s contributing writers with GARF. To say her loss will be felt internally is an understatement.
“Anytime George Romero is mentioned is good, because what we are doing is to provide a healthy legacy. We’re uplifting his legacy, we’re supporting the archive, and we’re also supporting the Horror Study Center. So, all of these three things are what the Foundation is striving to do. As far as I’m concerned, the more we say George Romero’s name, the better it is,” Desrocher-Romero recently told BD.
It’s the perfect encapsulation of her unwavering enthusiasm for supporting Romero’s legacy and the horror genre, and just a glimpse at how much she contributed to preserving it. She is, in short, an inspiration.
We send our deepest condolences to Suzanne Desrocher-Romero’s family, friends, and GARF.
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