Today Mark Rein, VP at Epic Games (Gears of War developer), issued a brief statement informing the press that the company was served a lawsuit this morning from Silicon Knights, creators of Eternal Darkness and the forthcoming RPG Too Human. The statement doesn't release any details about the lawsuit, but Rein does say he believes Knights' claims are baseless.



"We believe the claims against us are unfounded and without merit and we intend to fully defend against them," Rein said. "We'd love to tell you more about it but unfortunately our lawyers want us to save our comments for the courthouse so we're going to do our best to comply with their wishes."

Rein assured us any further pursuit of comment would result in a "no comment." We do know that Silicon Knights has licensed Epic's Unreal Engine 3 for use in Too Human.

Update: Denis Dyack, president of Silicon Knights, said in his own press release Thursday that the Unreal Engine 3 did not work as Epic represented it would and that "Epic has been unable or unwilling" to fix the problems.

"Our strong preference is to focus on making games, not be in court, Dyack said. "Unfortunately though, as explained in our lawsuit, we have had extensive problems with the Unreal Engine 3 that Epic has been unwilling or unable to rectify. For more than a year, we have been trying to reach an agreement with Epic to resolve these issues without resorting to litigation, but were unable to come to reasonable terms with Epic. Regrettably, we are now forced to go to court in order to achieve satisfaction. We remain hopeful, however, that we can reach a reasonable business resolution with Epic at some point."

The Silicon Knights release goes on to accuse Epic of selling its unfinished middleware to developers and using those companies' licensing fees to fund Gears of War - at the expense of fixing Unreal Engine 3's alleged problems.

"No doubt Gears is a fun and phenomenally successful game, but as we alleged in our complaint against them, we strongly believe that from the perspective of someone waiting for a game engine that Epic promised it would deliver almost two years ago, it seems pretty clear that Gears was built on the backs of the Unreal Engine licensees. We certainly stand by our allegations in the lawsuit that instead of using our licensing fees to develop and support the Unreal Engine 3, Epic used that money to build Gears," Dyack said.

via IGN