Once a rival to Dead By Daylight and precursor to the likes of Evil Dead of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th is unavailable to purchase on Steam and its official servers will be closed at the end of 2024. Attempting to keep the multiplayer horror game alive, a free-to-play fan remake was originally poised for a release date reveal in April. Now, however, the owners of various Friday the 13th copyrights have intervened and issued a cease and desist order. If you were hoping for an unofficial return for Friday the 13th, the online slasher, which to this day boasts a ‘mostly positive’ rating on Steam, appears to be dead for good.
Friday the 13th Resurrected was an online horror game based largely on Illfonic’s 2017 original. Free to play, it would have allowed players to continue to access a revamped and revised version of Friday the 13th after the official servers for the multiplayer murder-’em-up are permanently pulled on Tuesday December 31. However, a cease and desist order from Horror Inc., which owns various copyrights connected to the Friday the 13th franchise, means the Resurrected project has been permanently shuttered.
“There can be no dispute that you know your conduct is unauthorized and unlawful,” a representative for law firm Greenberg Glusker, Joshua Geller, writes on behalf of Horror Inc, in a letter that was allegedly sent to Friday the 13th Resurrected’s creators. “In your Discord, numerous users have pointed out that proceeding to distribute this game without a license would obviously be copyright infringement. Those warnings are correct, and your cavalier disregard of copyright law exposes you to liability for wilful infringement.”
“The project is most likely over,” Friday the 13th Resurrected’s creators say, “but we do plan to work on other projects.” They claim that they “are still waiting for a response from some people we have contacted, but for now we are working on removing all of Horror Inc.’s owned content.
“It’s a shame that someone wants to fight against a fan made project with no profit made. It wasn’t our intention to ‘hurt the brand’ as Horror Inc. claims we did. Not only is the project over, but so is the franchise itself, as it seems that Horror Inc. just wants to leave this incredible series behind them and let it be forgotten.”
Friday the 13th was delisted from Steam on Sunday December 31, 2023, after the game’s publisher, Gun Media, lost the official series license. Working with developer Sumo Digital, Gun has since published The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a multiplayer horror game based on the titular 1974 film.
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