Atlus sues fans who revived the shut down MMORPG SMT: Imagine, private servers taken down
Atlus has filed a court case against fans who attempted to revive Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine, an MMORPG that was shut down in 2016. Two defendants were named in the suit: COMP_hack and Rekuiemu, the former of which fully reverse engineered the SMT: Imagine server with open source code, while the latter hosted the servers. The fan effort initially released the year after Atlus shut down the MMO, in 2017, though the project would see updates all the way into 2021.
At the tail-end of 2021, on December, 28th, Atlus filed a lawsuit against them, alleging that the project was a "blatant violation of U.S. copyright law", as not only did the two revive the game without Atlus's authorization, Rekuiemu made an exact copy of the original Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine website from 2007 and made it their own. Initially, this website noted the copyrights of the original teams involved with the MMO--Atlus, SEGA, and Cave--but Rekuiemu added their own copyright next to those, as well. They also put their own logo at the bottom of the site, which Atlus took issue with, purporting that this kind of behavior is copyright infringement.
Meanwhile, a separate revival project of Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine exists, called SMT: ReImagine. This version used the final Japanese version of the game, and also offered a partial translation patch, and used its own form of launcher. ReImagine was not targeted by Atlus's lawsuit, but following the ReImagine team's discovery of the court battle between COMP_hack, Rekuiemu, and Atlus, and a summons had been issued to the defendants, the SMT: ReImagined project was shut down, along with its own custom servers, in order to protect the team of fans that had worked on it for years.
Source
