The following was composed by
Agent12, director of the
Crimson Echoes project, to clarify on the first announcement regarding the very real Cease and Desist Order the Chrono Compendium received from Square Enix on May 8. Some have surmised that the C&D may be a hoax, but rest assured that this situation is real and not a hoax.
Hello Everyone,
If you are not sure what's going, on please take a brief visit to
www.crimsonechoes.com.
Pretty intense weekend. I'm sorry for taking so long to respond, as I went white water rafting over the weekend and came back to this little fiasco. This post is going to first give everyone a my feelings on the matter, answer some questions and highlight what we can do going forward.
First of all a bit of history. I started working on this project several years ago. I've poured an embarrassing amount of time into this game, but despite what you may think it never consumed my life. I took 2 years off the project when school got rough and then came back and steamrolled the game to the finish. I vowed to never let this impact my social life and made sure that my peers did the same. This game was a hobby for me; it was a fun way to use my computing background and probably helped me land a job (well....at least a little bit). I also took it as a a way to practice my team leading skills, and I hope I didn't anger anyone that worked on the project (I was very very picky about how people worked on this game). In fact, anyone who worked on the project, feel free to give me feedback on how you felt I did; I'm honestly interested. So back on point, this game is secondary in my life. I'm in a very good place right now and am not willing to jeopardize everything I have for a hobby. I firmly believe that SE is wrong in this case, but I'm not willing to become a martyr over it. I always considered this to be a form of fan art, no different than if someone made a flash video, picture, or novel.
When the C&D came, I ripped the ROM into 4 seperate pieces and flew each piece to a separate part of the world. Each piece is protected -- not just by a giant martial arts trained monkey, but also by a series of riddles that get increasingly difficult. To put it in perspective, destroying this game is probably what Da Vinci would feel like if he had to rip the Mona Lisa in half right before adding the final touches on her finger nails. It's one of the more difficult decisions I've had to make, but remember this is just a hobby for me.
OK, onto some of the things I've been reading on the internets:
You guys are cowards/idiots just release the game:This is so ridiculously easy to say when you are not the person who received the C & D letter. I'm beating a dead horse here, but I am not willing to put my life on the line for this. These people didn't just have our names and addresses, but threatened a fine up to 150,000 dollars in the event that the game gets "distributed". I'm sorry; it honestly isn't worth it. Also, please stop comparing us getting a letter to the pirate bay getting a letter. They are not only in a different country but they are not the creators of the content that is copyrighted. And oh yea.......they were found guilty too.
Yea right, you guys just couldn't finish and wanted attentionI hope the videos that were put on crimsonechoes.com would stop this nonsense. If not those then the beta testers who have played through the game start to finish. If not those, then the updates we have been doing over the last couple of months ramping up to the release. If not those, then the fact that I'm just that awesome
The letter's photoshopped, the light is bouncing off it all wrong, definitely photoshoppedYou know what.......i really do hope you guys are right about this one. If it's not real they did a pretty good job, better than most internet idiots I come across. The headers, address, cited laws, etc seem to checkout. Except I'm not 100% sure what their beef with TF is? Anyway, the e-mail header checked out, so it legitimately came from SE.
why in the WORLD would you put that incrimnating piece of info in the readme First of all, read the whole thing (they left out the middle part...):
The fans and members of Kajar Laboratories acknowledge that under
M. Kramer Manufacturing Company, Inc. v. Andrews, 783 F.2d 421 (4th Cir. 1986),
ROM altering and modification is illegal, and the demo has been made without the consent of Square Enix. However, Kajar Laboratories wishes that Square Enix view it as a piece of fanfiction or other fan-related work, falling in the general body of fan community proceedings that are too numerous to prosecute and summarily have a positive effect on the popularity of its games. Should Square Enix perceive the project as a threat to its sales or intellectual property, Kajar Laboratories will immediately cease operation on the project and comply with Square Enix's orders.
This readme was for the demo (~1 chapter). We certainly hadn't poured 5 years of work into the game at this point. It wouldn't be a big deal at all if SE would have wanted to shut us down at this point, so we thought we would give them a way to do it nicely. The makers of CE do NOT want to be enemies of SE, we are probably their biggest fans. I really really really wish they would have taken action back then though....
Unfortunately their lack of action back then made us more confident that they didn't mind our work
. Prophets Guile was released without a hitch and had several thousand downloads. The ROM hacking community for 2D/SNES games seemed to be chugging along without a second thought. So we didn't mind giving an update here and there (skeleton code finished, beta testing started etc) because we honestly truly believed Square Enix was ok with us.
~
OK, let's talk future. This morning I sent an email back to Square Enix Legal asking if we could work on some sort of negotiation. Go ahead and lecture me oh how pointless this is, I'm a pretty smart dude (even though I use the word dude) and realize that I'm not talking to people -- I'm talking to lawyers; but after searching quite awhile for any sort of communication channel I couldn't find any. In my opinion, this is the best bet we have. Some points I made:
* I explained to them that this was simply a new form of fan art
* The aforementioned fan art was made by their most devoted fans
* The actions taken would only serve to anger the fan community
* We never distributed the ROM Image and adamantly told people to only use our product if they legally owned the game
* That we never ever ever ever ever wanted to make profit off of this game, to the point that the compendium doesn't even have ads on it
You get the jist. I wouldn't hold your breath, though.
Other than that the absolute best thing you can do is let our story be known. While I'm not willing to be crucified for CE, I wouldn't mind CE being an example to help out any future hacks. I truly do think that this is the future of fan appreciation and should be taken as a sign of flattery not competition. I will be willing to answer any questions for any gaming websites or even social media websites (just ping me here). I created aliases on digg and reddit (CEAgent12, and agent12 respectively; how annoying that agent12 was taken). Please feel free to send out this story to any gaming website you know; I feel like the story is pretty interesting and raises some interesting questions (though I am biased of course
). And for goodness sake, if anyone knows someone at SquareEnix who would be able to open a channel of communication please let us know.
http://digg.com/nintendo/Chrono_Trigger_sequel_98_comlete_C_Ded_before_release--JP
