Here’s the story.
And the hil-AR-ious Amazon customer reviews.
So the facts as I understand them are:

*Majestic Studios is a three person team and it took them nearly a decade to release a slideshow adventure game.  Like, one of the easiest genres of games to create.  Mostly writing and art, very little programming.
*They didn’t create any original art for this game, and barely Photoshopped the assets they stole from successful games such as Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Unreal Tournament.
*They got all this blatant plagiarism past a publisher and actually got the thing released commercially.

The game’s story reminds me of a cross between Myst and maybe King’s Quest(?) but I’ll withhold judgment on that since it doesn’t seem like anyone is complaining about the story.

What I can’t believe is how long it took for them to get to this point.  I haven’t actually done it yet, but I don’t think it should take so long to get an adventure game out there, especially if all you do is write the story. If you’re not making your own art, then creating a slideshow adventure game should be pretty similar to writing a novel.  And once they were actually looking to produce the thing commercially, how did they think they could avoid hiring an artist to create original art for them? In what world is it ok to release screenshots as though they were original IP?

Though, as a game enthusiast and wannabe developer, I take comfort in the fact that stuff this horrible actually gets released somehow.  This should mean that games of genuine quality from newcomers have a chance of being picked up by a publisher.

When I myself have produced such an original game, recalling this story will give me the confidence to start shopping it around, secure in the knowledge that at least I’m NOT the guys at Majestic.