Court documents may explain the disappearance of Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory

Friend Computer inspects the remains of a traitorous citizen

(Image credit: Nacon)

Two years ago, Orwellian sci-fi RPG Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory was removed from sale within weeks of its release. The reason for its delisting has remained a mystery, but a set of court documents unearthed by Gamekult shed light on the situation.

The court documents detail a complaint lodged by publisher Bigben Interactive, AKA Nacon, against Paranoia's rights-holders in October of 2021. Greg Costikyan and Eric Goldberg, two of the creators of the Paranoia tabletop RPG, are named in the complaint, which is apparently about a breach of a license agreement.

PC Gamer has obtained Costikyan and Goldberg's answer to the complaint and counterclaim of their own, which was filed in United States District Court in the Southern District of New York on March 11. According to this document, the trouble began when Bigben published a press release announcing a release date of September 10, 2019, without Costikyan and Goldberg's approval, and in spite of "their concern about advertising a potentially unrealistic release date".

The publisher then provided a pre-release master of the game for approval in which "software bugs and inconsistent/poor user experience issues" were responsible for "a product significantly below commercial standards" and, as they put it, "release of this version would tarnish the [Paranoia] brand."

While the publisher agreed the game wasn't ready yet, Bigben then announced a revised release date of November 14 via another press release issued without Costikyan and Goldberg's approval. A subsequent version of the game presented for their review in October was apparently still buggy enough that, at their request, the publisher provided "a new spreadsheet listing 74 combined major and minor bugs" that were known to remain.

Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory was then released without the rights-holder's permission or even knowledge, exclusively on the Epic Games Store. On learning this, they wrote to Bigben demanding its removal multiple times, before going directly to Epic with a DMCA request. As a result, the game was withdrawn from sale on January 24, 2020.

Nacon has also been involved in a contractual dispute with developer Frogwares over The Sinking City, with Frogwares using a DMCA takedown to get their own game removed from Steam after claiming that Nacon had uploaded a "cracked and pirated" version of it without permission.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.