The year is 2025, and there's no better indication that we live in an increasingly meaningless and absurdist hellscape than the fact I read the news "They're re-releasing a 2006 videogame based on a 1984 movie, but with upscaled graphics, but also they might have just bundled mods into it without anyone's permission" and thought anything other than "Sure, why not, pile it on".
In fairness, Scarface: The World is Yours achieved some solid commercial and critical success—it was developed by Radical Entertainment, the auteurs behind The Simpsons: Hit & Run three years prior and, later on, the Prototype games. There were even plans for a sequel, though that got canned in 2009.
EC Digital, a publisher I could find nothing about (more on that in a moment), accidentally pushed the game to the Epic Store early. This is confirmed by its Steam page, where you can find a news post that reads:
"Due to a technical issue during backend configuration, the game was unintentionally pushed live on a different platform earlier than planned. We want to clarify that our intended long-term release platform includes Steam, and we're now accelerating our efforts to finalize this version."
But there might be a hanging asterisk over this whole thing. As noted by Wario64 on Bluesky, "According to the Scarface EGS release that's already up, it includes a silent patch and fusion fix". In other words, mods that Scarface: The World is Yours fans added to the game to make it playable.
The creator of SilentPatch, Silent, writes: "This release reportedly ships SilentPatch and Fusion Fix, and none of us were contacted about this in advance (which isn't necessary as per the license, but would be nice)."
There's also the point, partially made by Silent in that post, that getting this game out of licensing hell would be a Herculean task. You've got movie licences and soundtrack licences to wrestle with, but there's also the fact that no-one involved with the original game is actually around anymore.
Vivendi Games merged with Activision in 2008, closing Sierra Entertainment in the process. As a development studio? Radical Entertainment became a support studio back in 2012, and as of 2022 had a whopping six developers from the original squad remaining.
So here we have a purported remake from a completely unheard-of publisher, which may or may not be using mods without permission, featuring a tangled mess of licensing issues, originally created by studios that don't exist anymore, accidentally releasing an Epic Games store version of a beloved PS2 tie-in with zero warning? I dunno if the boss is gonna like this.
Here's where I'd usually say "I've reached out to EC Digital and I'll update this article in case I receive a response", but I can't find any contact information, and the publisher's website is blocked here in the UK. Instead, I've reached out to Steam and Epic to see if we've got the genuine article on our hands.
