“Welp, it happened,” developer Lilith Walther said on Twitter late last week. “Sony contacted me.” Walther has spent the past two years working on Bloodborne Kart – a meme turned Mario-Kart-esque racing game featuring Bloodborne characters and locations with 12 racers, 16 maps, and a full campaign – and was gearing up to release it on January 31. Now Walther and her team have to delay the game and change its whole identity. Fun fact: Prior to the two years she spent on Bloodborne Kart, Walther dedicated a whole additional year of her life to a free PlayStation 1-style demake of Bloodborne that launched in 2022 without issue.
You might be wondering what the difference is here. To that I reply: I don’t know! Karts? I reached out to Sony for more information, but it did not reply ahead of publishing.
Walther, at least, hasn’t let the setback get to her. “We were all expecting this to happen so we could be pleasantly surprised if it didn't,” she wrote. “As much as I pushed for this to be ‘the meme made real’ so to speak, turning this into an original game that we have full creative control over is kind of exciting. This is a fan game no more!”
Which is a good attitude to have when you’re rolling – or in this case, quickstepping – with the punches. But it’s still hard not to feel like Sony did Walther and her team dirty here. Fan games like Walther’s have helped keep the Bloodborne community alive in the absence of anything new – even a PC port, please, I’m begging you – in years. The Bloodborne demake and Bloodborne Kart, specifically, have generated numerous positive headlines across multiple publications and a stream of viral videos on platforms like YouTube and TikTok. You can’t buy that kind of positive press, but Sony got it for free, from fans, who in turn poured years of blood, sweat, and tears into these projects. Then, mere days before release, Sony forced them to go back to the drawing board.
Who, in this day and age, benefits from this kind of last-second takesies backsies approach? I mean, sure, it’s good that Sony didn’t cease and desist the entire project, but that makes all of this even more mystifying. Why wait until everybody’s at the finish line – Sony in terms of potential PR benefits and the game in terms of completion – to pull a U-turn? I’m sure it makes perfect sense if you’re a corporate lawyer living in the year 2006, but for the rest of us – who are not being paid a small fortune to behave as though we’ve been frozen in a block of ice for two decades – it’s an inscrutable decision. They can’t all be Toby Fox, I suppose.
In other news, Sony is hosting a PlayStation State of Play on Wednesday.
“Sony, this is your chance to announce the funniest thing,” Walther wrote in response.
