Distortion Games

Truth: Jamie, Robbie, Jacques, Henrik, Bing, Marvin

Dare: Angus, Shawn, Jackie, Chase

Many of you are already aware of this, but the youtuber YuB played a fan made game on his channel today that was a copy of The BOSS. The person used several tracks from The BOSS without permission, copied its plot beat for beat, and even copied several lines of dialogue and running gags, such as Sans setting up shop in YuB’s house.

I want to clarify that YuB is innocent in this and he had no idea that he was playing a game ripped off from ours. He has already responded saying as much and apologized. We do not advocate any hate or vitriol whatsoever being thrown in his direction. It is not his fault that this happened and since he’s unfamiliar with Jack, he couldn’t have known. We also don’t advocate for hate being sent to the game’s creator either.

That being said, we would appreciate it if those with an itch.io account reported the game for stolen assets. I’m doubtful that the game’s creator is willing to take it down despite us telling him that we want him to remove all the things that he stole from us. We don’t object to the premise (youtuber sucked into their computer) being copied; a premise is a baseline from which a lot of very different creative decisions can be made. We’re not even the first Jack fan game to have done it. But this insulting lack of respect for the 9 months of effort and 50 people involved in the creation of The BOSS (or any game) cannot and should not fly under the radar.

Fan works are inherently derivative. That means they’re not copies but homages created to further the original work rather than replace it. That’s why we went to the effort of studying the characters we were writing so that we could write dialogue that fit them rather than copying jokes or dialogue outside of catchphrases that we all know the characters would use. There’s nothing wrong with fan works as long as their creators know that a good fan work builds on the original rather than steals from it. A game that pays homage to The BOSS would not be offensive to us at all because it goes to the effort of studying it and trying to add to it. A game that steals from it while offering very little is not okay.

We were never approached about this game. We never gave its creator permission to use our music or our running gags or our dialogue. That makes this stolen from rather than inspired by our work.

I’m going to be posting a link to the game’s itch.io page in a reblog of this. To anyone who has an account, please report it. As I said before, we have no issues with our premise being used, but we want our stolen music, at the very least, removed.

However, we do NOT support plagiarism, which could be categorized as:

- Stealing the plot/music/sprites/etc. of another piece of media deliberately and without credit.

- Using characters that aren't yours and not crediting their creator(s).