Working with foreign IPs is always risky. Even if they have flexible policies and usually don’t pursue people who use them, it is still someone else’s intellectual property. At any moment, they can send their lawyers to let us know that we shouldn’t be doing that. Something that happens very often with Nintendo, although the most striking case so far this year has had Sony as the protagonist.
An independent developer named Bunlith has been developing a game that is a mix of Bloodborne and Mario Kart for years, called Bloodborne Kart. Starting as an April Fool’s joke in 2021, it would become a full-fledged project during 2022. All so that, when it was about to be released at the end of 2023, Sony told them that they couldn’t release the game with the name Bloodborne or its most distinctive elements.
Far from giving up, what Bunlith and his team have done is rename it and change the most distinctive elements of the game. The game is now called Nightmare Kart and features 20 racers, 16 maps, a campaign with boss fights, and a battle mode. All of this with enough changes to be different enough from Bloodborne to avoid a lawsuit.
This is especially peculiar because Bunlith’s previous game was Bloodborne PSX, a reimagining of Bloodborne as if it were a game for the original PlayStation, which Sony had no problem with. In any case, Nightmare Kart will be released for free on May 31st for Steam and itch.io.
