Tiny indie studio realises someone is selling its free games for $100+ on eBay and is totally stoked: 'We're a real developer now' it declares, adding an 'in your face!' to a homebrew convention that rejected them

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But Safety Stoat says you should under no circumstances actually buy the damn thing.

Boxart for the 1982 Mega Drive game Dragon Fire, showing a dragon breathing fire.
(Image credit: Imagic)

Friends, let me summon my full videogame-expert authority to tell you: Studios don't like it when you pirate their games. They're not fans! And fair enough, really. If I found out that someone was filtering all my articles into Athletic Dame Repacks that you had to read off of torrented .iso files, I'd be… mystified, primarily—this is a free website—but also a bit miffed.

That sets me apart from the good folks at Safety Stoat Studios, a small studio that specialises in "innovative games that run on outdated hardware," meaning Sega Mega Drive/Genesis games released (on Itch.io) in our big year of 2024. Generally, the expectation is that curious players will check them out on emulators, but Safety Stoat recently became aware of at least one entrepreneur who had taken one of its games, packaged it up in seemingly era-appropriate Japanese Sega packaging, and began flogging it for $120 on eBay.

But although you might think Safety Stoat would be upset at someone trying to turn a quick buck off a nicked version of its game, the studio was chuffed. "We have been pirated; we're a real game studio now!" it declared in a blogpost on Itch. "After 12 games, 2 albums, and a lot of elbow grease, prayers, tears, adrenaline, and cortisol, we have arrived in the space traditionally occupied by industry giants… we now have unauthorized reproductions of our IP showing up in Asia!"

To be fair to the faker, the box looks pretty convincing. Then again, that's mostly because it straightforwardly rips off the boxart for Dragonfire, a real game from 1982. Still, someone went through the trouble to slap some genuine screenshots on the back, gin up a fake manual, and create the cartridge. Points for effort. "The title does look badass and we like the hiragana(?) below, although we have no idea what it says," says Safety Stoat. In the comments, Mina Harker points out the katakana is a transliteration of Mythdragon: "ミmi スsu ドdo ラra ゴgo ンn".

Which is rather charming, if you ask me. I'm tempted to spin up Retroarch and try out Mythdragon—for free—myself.

Joshua Wolens
Joshua Wolens
News Writer

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.