Court Documents Reveal What Happened to Paranoia: Happiness Is Mandatory

gamerant.com:

Paranoia is a sci-fi tabletop role-playing game first published in 1984 and written by Greg Costikyan, Dan Gelber, and Eric Goldberg. Set in a dystopian universe, the award-winning RPG has spawned spin-off comics, novels, and video games, the latest of which is called Paranoia: Happiness Is Mandatory. It briefly appeared as an Epic Games Store exclusive in December 2019 before being delisted without explanation.

The game was published by Nacon, formerly known as BigBen Interactive, a name that might be familiar due to the company’s ongoing court cases with developer Frogwares, the studio behind Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter and Lovecraftian horror title The Sinking City. Among other contractual disputes,Frogwaresalleges that Nacon pirated The Sinking City and uploaded it to Steam to sell without the developer’s permission. Court documents filed in October 2021 by Nacon and a counterclaim by Paranoia creators Costikyan and Goldberg reveal that the publisher is in the midst of a legal dispute with another group as well. Gamekult, a French gaming news outlet, tracked down Costikyan and Goldberg’s court filings but not those of Nacon. So the story is slightly one-sided, but still enlightening.

The Sinking City Returns to Digital Stores Amid Legal Dispute

In 2016, Costikyan and Goldberg signed a contract with development studio Cyanide, owned by Nacon, to create Paranoia: Happiness Is Mandatory, a video game adaptation of Paranoia. The two writers retained the right to review the game before publishing, but by August 2019, Costikyan and Goldberg had not yet received a copy for review. Despite this, according to documents filed by the writers, Nacon wanted to announce an October 3 release date. The two writers refused to