Fans of the Red Dead Redemption series may be sad to hear that a mod project was shut down just a few days ago. According to Polgyon, Take-Two Interactive shut down a project known as “Red Dead Redemption Damned Enhancement Project,” a fan project developed by Johnathon Wyckoff. The project was allegedly intended to “[enhance] graphics and visuals in Take-Two’s Red Dead Redemption game” and make it playable on Windows PC,” which is not a platform that the game has been released on.
In a post on a Grand Theft Auto forum back in September, Wyckoff had stated that the project was “halted,” and on December 27th he stated that the project was cancelled. According to Torrent Freak, on December 26th Take-Two Interactive filed a lawsuit against the developer in the New York court system. The main argument of Take-Two is that the developers projects are in breach of Take-Two’s intellectual property rights and violate the user agreement license. The other project that the lawsuit focuses on is the “RDRII Project” which intends to add the full Red Dead Redemption map to Red Dead Redemption 2. The lawsuit states that “those unauthorized changes include but are not limited to importing the entire game map of 2010’s Red Dead Redemption into the 2018 game Red Dead Redemption II, enhancing graphics and visuals in Take-Two’s Red Dead Redemption game, and allowing players to play an enhanced version of the game on personal computer (‘PCs’), a platform for which Take-Two itself has not yet released the Red Dead Redemption game.”
Take-Two also argues that Wyckoff cannot claim to be taking on these projects as a hobby due to him taking donations with the implication that taking those donations is a form of payment. Wyckoff had been given multiple cease and desist letters with a deadline of November 18th to comply with Take-Two’s demands. As this deadline passed without Wyckoff’s compliance, Take-Two argued that it had no choice but to file a lawsuit seeking “injunctive relief and damages that it will suffer as a result of Wyckoff’s direct and contributory copyright infringement under the Copyright Act of 1976.” However, on December 28th, the project developer Tweeted that he is in talks with Take-Two Interactive.
No new information is available regarding the lawsuit at the moment but more information will likely be revealed at a later date.