Redbedlam appears to be completely dead.
Continue reading “Last Remnant of Missing Ink Developer Pulled From Steam”
Tag: Redbedlam
Whatever Happened To: RedBedlam Ltd.
As I delve deep into the “whatever happened to those people” part of our ten year anniversary, one game caught my memory like a flash of lightning in a bowl of chocolate pudding. Whatever happened to that game The Missing Ink?
Actually that answer is obvious: It was shut down. The Missing Ink shut down its servers way back in January 2014 without much of a blurb from the press at the time. The closure was not meant to be permanent as developer Redbedlam announced that they would be retooling the game and keeping the two dimensional paper cutout characters while expanding on the three dimensional world and the things that it offered. That never happened, The Missing Ink never relaunched and for that matter it doesn’t look like Redbedlam ever acknowledged the game’s existence after January 2014.
So what the hell happened to RedBedlam? Thankfully for us, the company is a UK business and as such its records are on public display over at Companies House. A few months after this announcement, RedBedlam posted its fiscal results for the year ending May 31 showing net assets of £136,838. In October 2015, RedBedlam would release the game Bedlam, a first person shooter with a rather odd art style. The game would peak at 315 concurrent users on Steam but not until 2018.
By 2016 these total assets would plummet to £21,385, which appears to be where the company starts circling the drain. Bedlam receives its last patch on November 4, 2015. Fast forward another year and the assets drop to £3,072. By this point the company is running as a shell corporation, as the fiscal reports show that there is only one employee hired, down from five in 2016.
Companies House later filed to strike RedBedlam off of the official record. Apparently someone was around to contest this, as the proposal was removed with cause shortly thereafter. By the end of the 2018 fiscal year, RedBedlam was a dry husk; its fiscal earnings showing a net negative in assets and zero employees still on record.
Of RedBedlam’s eight officers, only one remains: Kerry John Fraser-Robinson, who is presumably keeping the company up and running in name only to pull in what few sales Bedlam is offering and to make phone calls in hopes of getting some investors on board. Otherwise it looks like this is the end for RedBedlam.
What Happened: Missing Ink Edition
What Happened is a series of articles partially inspired by you, the community, and otherwise brought on by a fleeting moment where the flapping wires in my brain connect and memories are able to get through. Given the long development nature of MMOs, it isn’t uncommon to have a game announced and then never hear from it again, the developer drifting silently into the night only to resurface somewhere in another dimension.
I last talked about The Missing Ink in 2014, even then asking what happened to the game and its development crew at Redbedlam. The game (pictured above) shut down in early 2014 with the note that it would be coming back later that year, and we haven’t heard anything since. None of the social media accounts have been maintained since that announcement, and the game is clearly dead.
So what happened to Redbedlam? Are they dead as well? You might think so, but they are alive and kicking. They released a game last October, a shooter called Bedlam that has quite an odd mishmash of visual styles. Bedlam is available on sale today both on Steam and on Indiegala, the latter being much cheaper, and it currently holds a “very positive” rating on Steam.
It’s safe to say that The Missing Ink has probably been shelved for now, if not indefinitely, but it’s good to see that Redbedlam is still actively creating games that people like to play.
Whatever Happened: The Missing Ink
Here at MMO Fallout, we occasionally like to ask and answer a straightforward question: Whatever happened to that one game we heard about a while back? While looking through the game list, I realized that we haven’t heard from The Missing Ink in nearly a year. Experimental MMOs and indie games built by small studios tend to go for long periods of time with no press coverage and then, out of the blue, we find out that they had already shut down well over a month ago. Sorry Fusionfall!
The Missing Ink is the latest project by RedBedlam, the UK developer responsible for the now defunct MMO Roma Victor. What set The Missing Ink apart from the rest was its unique art style, with characters all crafted out of two dimensional drawings on paper. It didn’t break any new ground, but the presentation was charming enough to warrant some off-again on-again gaming. Part of the fun was simply logging in every now and then to see how the early alpha client was progressing.
As you may have figured, The Missing Ink has shut down without any kind of mention by the game media. The servers went down at the end of January alongside an announcement that the game will receive a full overhaul and release later this year.
“As a result of the feedback from this community and our internal test team, we’re started work on a brand new game design for The Missing Ink. We’ll obviously be keeping our lovable 2D characters whilst expanding the explorable 3D worlds and much, much more.”
The good news is that The Missing Ink will hopefully find its way back into our hearts later this year. The bad news is that it will have to share that space with Sonic drive-ins that will be opened up in my neighborhood soon. Until then, follow The Missing Ink on Twitter.
Roma Victor Developers Working On Sandbox MMO
Do you remember Roma Victor? I do, and was very disheartened when the company finally shut the servers down back in January 2011. But with all night comes dawn, and the folks at RedBedlam wanted to make it clear that this was not the last we’d heard of them:When I was a little filly and the sun was going down
RedBedlam is currently focussed exclusively on developing projects for third parties. It is worth bearing in mind however that a great deal of work was put into the project codenamed ‘Roma Victor 2’, and we still have every intention of releasing a top quality historically authentic ‘remake’ at a later date. All user data from the original Roma Victor has been backed up and stored safely. It is our intention that this data will be used in a future Roma Victor game to ensure that our original community will have new assets proportional to their previous standing.
Well those of you waiting on a Roma Victor 2 can step to the side, because RedBedlam has announced The Missing Ink, a free to play browser/tablet MMO coming next year that features players taking the role of a Paper Mari0 style game in a 3D sandbox world (your characters are paper thin) where players can explore and build and fight in pvp combat.
You can find the announcement on Eurogamer here. The Missink Ink will be available to play when it is released as an alpha next month.
Roma Victor to Shut Down: RV2 May Die
I think I’ve directly spoken of Roma Victor once on MMO Fallout, not because of any malice towards the title, but because the only newsworthy piece I came across in regards to the title was the act of crucifying cheaters. And much like any other image I find, it was subsequently beaten and overused for lame comedic effect (my apologies to the players Cholo, Vondum, Germanikus, and any others in the image).
Roma Victor is an odd game set in 180ad, just before the fall of the Roman Empire. Players begin as slaves and eventually move on to fight for either the Roman or Barbarian side of the war (go with the Barbarians, they eventually win). Roma Victor is a levelless game, instead choosing to use a skill tree that, like Darkfall and Runescape, is raised by training that skill (Woodcutting raised by cutting wood).
Unfortunately, not unlike that family member you never visit, my next news article in relation to Roma Victor is not only a sad one, but also fairly confusing to myself. Roma Victor will be shut down in an announcement that, yes, came out last month, but has taken me a little while to decipher the stages of shutting down, which I have submitted here:
- On May 5th, account registration will be activated.
- On November 5th, No donations or payments will be accepted.
- May 5th 2011, Roma Victor shuts down for good.
If you play Roma Victor, at least you have over a year to say goodbye. If you haven’t had the chance to try Roma Victor, you have until May to set up your account. Roma Victor has no subscription fee, and runs solely off of voluntary donations and microtransactions.
The path Roma Victor walks down is the same one that will be traveled by the latest incarnation of Myst Online, that small video game communities run solely around donations do not make for a sustainable, let’s not even think about profitable, business. The developer team is readily admitting that Roma Victor hasn’t been profitable for a long time now, with a small community and no monthly fees. The decision is to slowly wind down Roma Victor in anticipation for Roma Victor 2, that will attempt to fix much of the company’s woes.
Current players will find all of their stuff imported into Roma Victor 2 when it hopefully releases next year, but if the announcement is anything to go off of, it is very possible that RV2 may never see the light of day. More on Roma Victor as it appears.
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