Friday The 13th: The Game was never set to be a final girl, but somehow, despite every legal hurdle, it has managed to survive night after night until now.
So, for those who don’t know, Friday the 13th: The Game was first hunted down back in 2018 when a legal dispute popped up. It was revealed that the developers never had the rights to create the game.
This copyright dispute caused the game to slow down and eventually go into hiding for good. The game killed its servers in 2020, and by the end of 2023, the game was removed from sale.
However, as any good horror fan knows, it’s not easy to kill off the villain for good, so a plan was hatched to bring Friday the 13th: The Game back from the dead through Friday the 13th: The Game – Resurrected.
However, just days after the resurrection was announced, a cease-and-desist letter was sent out citing the cavalier disregard of copyright law, and the project quickly disappeared.
Friday the 13th: The Game – Resurrected was a project set to be released by modders. It promised to include everything in the base game, along with content that didn’t make it to the official release.
Further content was also promised through post-launch updates.
The cease-and-desist letter read:
There can be no dispute that you know your conduct is unauthorized and unlawful. Indeed, in your Discord, numerous users have pointed out that proceeding to distribute this game without a license would obviously be copyright infringement.
Those warnings are correct, and your cavalier disregard of copyright law exposes you to liability for willful infringement. Among Horror’s other remedies, Horror will be entitled to seek statutory damages of $150,000 per infringement.
The letter also advised that if the mod team wanted to dodge that particular bullet, they needed to pull the plug on the project – for good. This did end up happening, but the team wasn’t going to go down silently:
It’s a shame that someone wants to fight against a fan-made project that has no profit made. It wasn’t our intention to “hurt the brand” as Horror Inc claims we did … Not only is the project is over, but so is franchise itself as it seems that Horror Inc. just wants to leave this incredible series behind them and let it be forgotten.
We did ask if there was a chance to get the rights to continue on the project, but they basically just told us no. We are probably moving on from Friday the 13th and will continue on with some other projects we have in planning.
So it seems that fans need to say their goodbye to Friday The 13th: The Game because rise again, it will not – at least not now.