Video game companies have tried a few interesting marketing strategies in the past – trying to get their game posters onto tombstones (that didn’t work for Shadow Man 2), or telling people to name their children Dovahkiin (people did it, but it didn’t seem to affect the already high sales of Skyrim). But even outside of the world of gaming, it would be hard to argue that deceiving your user base has ever gone over well. And so enters Tokyo 42.

This is where it gets interesting. Over the weekend, an unknown twitter presence attempted to start some kind of twitter war involving SMAC Games and Mode7. The accusation was that these two companies had ripped off his game from the 80s to make their own game. There were several issues with this claim, the first being that the images shared of Tokyo 41, the supposed predecessor, would have been incredibly impressive in the 80s, so impressive that there was no way people would not have remembered or been able to find information on it.

Perhaps it was an attempt to draw a comparison to an older style of game, which Tokyo 42 definitely is – it’s an isometric shooter with little in the way of details and lots in the way of shooting things and jumping – but whether or not that is a good thing for audiences has yet to be seen.

Regardless of whether or not it is a good idea to have your 2017 game looking like something thirty years old, the conversations on twitter hardly seemed to be doing Tokyo 42 any favors.