This is a single case that is really comically outlandish sure, but it couldn't have happened in an industry that wasn't prevaded by people that can get away with shit that's practically as bad and still make money from it.

So is the war in Iraq.

well, not at all, and that's a reprehensible and childish thing to say to prove a point about video games.

is this an rpg maker game?

p.s. this is their tagline

Tri Synergy - A revolutionary approach to software publishing.

Three computer fans are hoping to make a mint after the PC game they created went on sale in the USA.
Steve Bovis, Tim Croucher and Laurence Francis, all from Maidstone, have dreamt of seeing Limbo of the Lost played across the globe since they first started discussing the game 10 years ago.
Mr Francis, 47, who also provides the voice for the game's lead character Captain Briggs, said it was conceived for Amiga computers that went out of date in the 1990s.
He said: "Everything just sort of fizzled out. Then one day I was working in a pub and Tim and Steve walked in.
"I joked 'I thought you would be millionaires now', and they replied 'actually that is what we wanted to talk to you about'".
The three put their heads together and after three more years of hard work Limbo of the Lost - a PC adventure game - was born. It is a battle between fate and destiny, with players having to work through a series of puzzles and challenges to reach the end.
Mr Francis, a former landlord of The Pilot pub, Upper Stone Street, and now a mature student, said: "It is a sort of comedy come horror. A bit like Monty Python meets Evil Dead.
"Between the three of us we researched, wrote, designed, animated, scripted and developed the whole game from home."
Mr Francis, of Reginald Road, said he hoped their story would inspire other PC users to the full potential of their machines.
He added: "For us it started out as a hobby and then just grow.
"Our hope, if everything goes well with the sales, is that within a year we will all be stopping the day jobs and doing this full time."

I keep thinking that this is some kind of amazing practical joke by the developers of all those games. This is just too insane to be true. It seems nearly impossible that nobody involved in the project, from mapper to texturer to modeler to graphic designer to art director, ever noticed or decided to speak out against such blatant plagiarism.

It couldn't have been the work of a lone art director. That might have been a possibility if all of the games they stole from were obscure and largely unknown to the big public, but that's not the case at all. It must have been a concerted effort by everybody working on the game, and that's a very weird thought.

DOES NOT PARSE.