Nintendo has been perennially criticized for keeping their wealth of IPs under lock and key while they iterate on their old standbys Mario, Legend of Zelda, etc, but it looks like they have plans to open up that conceptual vault sometime soon.
As various outlets have reported, Nintendo has been content to silently renew their trademark on IP Eternal Darkness these past few years. This week, however, the patent they found has new wording added to it: "downloadable."
This suggests that the company is planning to publish Eternal Darkness to the eShop, or at least planning to. While the natural assumption is that the game would be coming to Wii U, I personally wouldn't rule out a 3DS release either.
For the unitiated, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem is a survival horror game developed by Silicon Knights for the Nintendo Gamecube and released on 2002. The game had you switching bodies between different protagonists across time to solve a Lovecraftian mystery. The game was a critical if not commerical success, remembered as one of the unique standout titles on that system. It was particularly remembered for its sanity meter, which would mess with player's heads by making things happen in the game that were unexpected.
Rumors of Gamecube games coming to the eShop did come up last year, but when asked, Reggie Fils-Aime explained that he would also love to bring those games over but they had nothing to announce.
On another end, Eternal Darkness is getting a spiritual successor of sorts from its developers. After the complicated legal entanglements that hit Silicon Knights, much of their staff regrouped into a new company called Precursor Games, who is now working on Shadow Of The Eternals. Precursor sought permission from Nintendo to use game elements from Eternal Darkness, including the aforementioned sanity meter.
And now, it seems we've now learned why Precursor had to even seek permission. Admittedly, this is all in the realm of speculation for now, but when Microsoft ended legal proceedings with Fox to renew their trademark for Killer Instinct, that was clearly a step towards getting the franchise revived into an Xbox One launch title. So this precedent bodes well for Eternal Darkness fans! We now have to wait.
Video is from the Eternal Darkness trailer.
