The founders of Playdead are having a legal war over who made more of Limbo

Many moons ago, Danish developers Playdead released bleak platformer Limbo and proved beyond reasonable doubt that Gamez R Art, while also giving a bunch of witless scriveners massive arachnophobia. Today, we learn that one of the studio’s co-founders, Arnt Jensen, is suing the other, Dino Patti, amid competing claims about the scale of his contribution to Limbo. Because of course all great things must end in calamity.

Our source of this story is Patti himself, who left Playdead in 2017 after the release of the wonderfully awful/awfully wonderful Inside, and is currently boss of Somerville developer Jumpship. He and Jensen have famously not been on great terms for years, but things came to a boil in late 2024, when Patti published an account of Limbo’s development on LinkedIn.

Back in March this year, Jensen argued that the LinkedIn post exaggerates Patti’s contribution to Limbo, insisting that “by providing recipients with core insights to the process of developing Limbo, you are falsely giving the impression that you played a significant role, including a creative role, in the development of the game.” He also claimed that the post includes an “unauthorised” photo.

For this alleged infringement, Playdead asked for 500,000 Danish kroner or $72,630 as “suitable compensation and reimbursement.” Now, Patti has revealed that Playdead’s lawyers are taking him to court in a podcast interview this week with Danish site Arkaden (via VGC).

For his part, Patti contends that Jensen is trying to delete him from the game’s origin story. “Arnt, please stop the bullying. I will not stop being who I am,” he declared back in March. “I will never erase my own history. You can’t rewrite the past just because of a bad breakup.” In the Arkaden podcast, Patti is upbeat about the situation, commenting that it’s an opportunity to set the record straight, but with all due respect to the guy, that’s the kind of thing you say when you’re being sued.

None of this interferes with my eagerness to hear about Playdead’s next game, “a third person science fiction adventure set in a remote corner of the universe”, which was revealed in 2017. At the risk of sounding like I’m picking my favourite dad, I’ve yet to play Somerville, which Malindy Hetfield described as an “interesting, if not particularly deep” spin on the Playdead school of apocalyptic minimalism.

I will ask Playdead and Jumpship for comment.