Ikea against the indie horror videogame set in one of its stores

In the original idea of ​​the survival horror game The Store is Closed, you found yourself trapped in a giant furniture shop without a living soul by day, but filled with extremely aggressive and horrifying salesmen at night. To top it all there are details such as uniforms, models on display, colors and catalogs with a design that referred only and only to a well-known brand, if the setting had not already been sufficient: Ikea. However, the Swedish giant does not seem to have taken this independent videogame project well and immediately moved its lawyers. And so the developer found himself in the awkward position of having to redesign all the environments to be able to debut after having conducted an excellent funding campaign on Kickstarter.

The official communication reached the hands of the developer Jacob Shaw is the so-called one. cease and desist or to be faced with an important choice: to desist from continuing the project or to meet a sure legal action, something unsustainable for a small independent producer, who in fact is now forced to review all the settings. Even if the term Ikea never appears in the text or in the presentation videos of the project on Kickstarter - where it has collected five times the minimum amount for production - it is clear to associate the location of The Store is Closed with the stores of the Swedish brand. The shop at the center of the game is immense and divided by product categories, with mazes that you are forced to follow unless you take hammers or other objects and break everything both to create a gap and for crafting or to build objects from materials rough.

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The Ikea logo is replaced by Styr, with identical yellow-blue combinations

Something that, however, sends the store managers into a rage or the employees of the store, who if they walk tame during the day and do not get upset if nothing is destroyed before their eyes, at night they turn into terrifying beings and maddened. "Now I have to desperately redo the whole aspect of the game to avoid being sued," commented the developer, who has received specific requests from Ikea's lawyers. In fact, he will have to change the blue and yellow signs, the building with a blue parallelepiped shape, the yellow uniforms of the staff, a gray path on the floor, furniture too similar to those in the catalog and various signs. Including that of the game store, which is called Styr, in the original idea a pun on the English term Store, but which incidentally is also a Swedish term that means "Controls" and therefore falls within the demands of the lawyers. But it is curious to note that Ikea is not actually a Swedish term, it is in fact the acronym of the initials of the founder Ingvar Kamprad and of Elmtaryd and Agunnaryd, that is the farm and the village where he was born and raised.