Do you remember Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory? This game which many believed lost has now made a quiet comeback.
The game has been stealthily released this morning on Steam with absolutely no fanfare from publisher Nacon or developer Cyanide.
As a matter of fact, as far as I could find, they have not said a word.
Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory is an RPG based on the dystopian universe of the tabletop RPG Paranoia by Greg Costikyan, Dan Gelber, and Eric Goldberg, originally published by West End Games.
It was released in December 2019 exclusively on the Epic Games Store and taken down a couple of months later without an immediate explanation.
It then turned out that Costikyan and Goldberg had filed a DMCA takedown notice to demand that Epic Games remove the game the game as it was released on the EGS against their will while still riddled with bugs.
Epic complied and Nacon sued the authors over their action, to which they responded with a countersuit for breach of contract.
Apparently, according to court filings, the case was settled by the parties in June 2023. This probably opened the door to a re-release.
Funnily one of the trailers on Steam still has an “E3 2019” label on its thumbnail, which is rather funny considering that even E3 is now officially defunct.
Apparently, they just slapped the old trailer on the page without bothering to make a new one or even to change the thumbnail.
Speaking of E3 2019, you can read our preview of the game, with our Editor-in-Chief Andrew Otton having tested the game exactly at that show. At the very least, it’s going to be a trip down Memory Lane.
We have reached out to Nacon to try to get some clarity about this mysterious re-release, but we haven’t received a reply by the moment of this writing. We’ll update the article if we hear something relevant going forward.
