Like many of you, I woke up to the AI slop It Lives Within "TV show" on the Choices app. Having spent thousands (no joke) of loving hours on the fan-made It Lives Within, I admit it felt like a bit of a kick to the gut, especially since I'd stayed up until 2 AM the night before, meticulously working on improving the programming of textbox animations for the updated version of the game.
But at the end of the day, the people are what own stories. It doesn't matter what PB puts out, especially when it so blatantly disrespects a series we all hold close to our hearts. We can choose what to support, what to value, and what to be our true version of these stories.
As such, I wanted to provide an update for "It Lives Within: The Obsidian Cut." We are working extremely hard to finish rewrites, and I apologize it's taking so long - but real work takes time. We take so long because we don't use AI to do our work for us. Our testers have found hundreds of bugs, which have been corrected. I'm currently working on some rewrites for chapters 21-22, and once that's finished, I'm going to play from start to finish with different MCs to include more complete personality variants for your MC.
While our game was highly beloved (which I am still so wholly grateful for three years after the final episode aired), I know some of you tried the original version and decided it wasn't for you. Others maybe never heard of it. But, with the news of AI It Lives Within dropping today, I just wanted to invite everyone to give our fan version a chance. If you tried it before and gave up, or haven't played it yet, I recommend waiting until Obsidian airs to experience that version for the first time. And if you did play the original, stick around! You'll love Obsidian when it airs. All of our testers are highly enjoying it and say that it improves on the story with every change, while still be the story they knew and love.
AI It Lives Within is frustrating and offensive, but ultimately, we never needed their blessing, and neither do you. Our story started small, with a team that never made any money. Everything was done out of passion and love for this series and these characters, and we were and still are, devoted to creating truly player-drive stories where your choices matter. A LOT. That passion is something that can never be generated in any machine. Stories from the heart speak to the heart, "canon" or not, and what really matters is how theses stories impact and inspire us.
Literally never use Tumblr aside from occasional reblogging (sorry for the DM's that I have struggled to respond to in um.... YEARS, I am SO sorry) I just want to say how much I miss older PlayChoices.
I haven't picked up the game in ages, I used to play pretty much every day. I jumped ship around the time Alpha was being released I think? I would maybe make a yearly appearance on the app to replay old books like ILITW, D&D, TC&TF, etc. The app used to share intriguing adventures in fantasy settings, historical dramas/mysteries and campy stories about rising to stardom. It started to almost exclusively create more smut oriented stories (which is fine but I feel like it really deterred good portion of the fan base, myself included)
I remember stories like Open Heart, Desire and Decorum and Blades of the Light and Shadow updating and the PlayChoices tag trending at number 1. Fan art, fan fiction and edits were being posted DAILY. Theories, speculations and memes would circulate, inside jokes would form, heated debates about yet another book using OH faces for MC would spark discussions. It felt like a thriving fandom bonding over different stories that were being produced by Pixelberry.
I don't know when momentum truly started to slow down on the app as I had abandoned ship before it truly became obvious, but I can't help but feel like the use of AI generated assets really stomped the passion a lot of fans had for the game. I also feel like a large portion of the fan base were maybe deterred from the overwhelming amount of smut books and lack of other genres being explored. Smut sells, I don't blame Pixelberry for this decision, but I feel like it was a really polarizing action on their part. Books like ILITW, BOLAS and ES really showed how a story doesn't have to rely on the romance aspect for it to be received positively by its audience (I would like to mention that I am aware that there were some books displaying relationships in more harmful and dangerous lights without calling them out within the narrative, such as Witness. If I recall correctly my experience reading it presented a possessive dynamic that was never discussed further, there was toxicity that was never confronted within the narrative, creating an unhealthy message to the player/reader)
I look back and think of how the Playchoices tag would trend a few times a week and smile. I think back to the community it made, how artwork of various mediums were created inspired by the books that were being released at the time. The excitement for a new book sequel to release, the dread (affectionately) of yet ANOTHER TRR book being released. I think back to how the characters in the older books and the fan artists of the community inspired me to pursue my illustrations more seriously and see my art in a new way and push myself to draw in a way that really resonated with me. It was truly heartbreaking to see Playchoices turn to AI slop instead of actual artists for their assets. I would take reused OH faces for the 1000th time over the genuine horror slop I've seen on my feed.
All this to say, without this app and its fandom I may not be where I find myself in my personal and professional art journey, for that I will be eternally thankful.
Thank you to anyone scrolling this tag and takes the time to read my ramble, sorry if it is all over the place and is read in a negative light. That's not my intention rather.... disappointment? Longing for old PB? Reminiscing perhaps? Idk but I just wanted to write a virtual message in a bottle and send it off into the virtual Tumblr sea I suppose.
I hope you have a good day to who ever is reading :3
I miss peak playchoices so much. I remember staying up to play It lives, Perfect Match, and Open Heart and then immediately going on tumblr to talk about it. Watching it get infested with AI and dying a slow death has been so painful
A couple days ago, I made a post addressing Pixelberry/Series Entertainment's "It Lives Within." At the time, I wasn't aware of the story, I only knew that the name was the same. Since then, I saw many people accusing it of plagiarizing our game. I decided to look into it more, and after having watched all the episodes on YouTube, the claims of plagiarism unfortunately seem to be valid. As such, I'd like to further address this situation, and provide a list of stolen ideas and art with screenshot proofs and explanations.
A few years ago, I had a video call with one of the original writers for the It Lives Series. He no longer works for Pixelberry, and did not work with them at the time of the video call. Though I knew nothing about their original plans for the game before starting this project (including that they also intended to name the game "It Lives Within"), he told me their plans on that call. It was going to be a survivor-type cave crawl story with giant bug-inspired and creepy crawler monster enemies, where you play as a new character who is attacked by these creatures while camping and separated from their friends. From my understanding, Connor and his crew would be sort of like Sam and Dean from SPN, acting as these experienced "hunters" who help protect them.
That is not what the story of what Choices "It Lives Within" was. At all.
This means that the AI """writers""" at Series Entertainment/PB were not creating this story based on the original writers’ plans. They made their story idea later - after ILW was completed in its entirety. Therefore, it's reasonable to follow that unlike the title, these similarities are not coincidence. Though even then, the title It Lives Within had to do with the cave setting and going literally into the earth, while the AI version has nothing to do with caves. So the reasoning for the title is not the same as the reasoning for their original title.
With all this in mind, let’s go over the similarities between our game and the Choices It Lives Within AI show. I am going to be putting it beneath a read more, in case there are people who are interested in playing ILW and don’t want to get it spoiled.
Major things they stole:
Their villain, Silas, is Matthias. Literally, that's it. He's Matthias.
Silas is an immortal man who's been alive for almost 200 years and was a member of the Westchester cult, where he knew Cora. Matthias is an immortal man who's been alive 200+ years and was a member of the Westchester cult, where he knew Cora. Silas wants to sacrifice redfield Noah due to his connection to the Power as part of a complicated ritual he's put together in order to... I'm not quite sure what, exactly, as the story was a bit hard to follow. Matthias wants to sacrifice Rowan, due to their connection to the Power, as part of a complicated ritual he's put together in order to gain more power and freedom and heal the corrupted Power. Silas thinks he’s all manipulative and the main crew states that "He’s getting us to do his work for him!” Matthias thinks he's all manipulative, and gloats about being a "puppet master" and getting people to do his work for him.
And then there's his appearance. That's literally the same hairstyle - even has the part on the same side and the same curly swoops. He's the same age. Same race. Literally, just like Connor in their story is a recognizable AI-version of his in-game sprite, that's what Silas looks like to Matthias. All he's missing is the beard.
The gang's base of operations is Cora’s cabin
This one is interesting. It's such a tiny detail, and I'd grown so used to the cabin being their safe place that when Connor was like "We need to get back to the cabin" it literally took me a moment to realize - wait. They had nothing to do with that cabin in the original series. Using that as a home base was literally our idea, an It Lives Within original.
The main enemies are mind controlled townspeople working for Silas
Instead of following the precedent of the previous games and having the enemies be Power-twisted animal monsters, they decided to make their enemies humans that are mind-controlled into zombie-like beings with that attack the gang in hordes. This is a rip-off of It Lives Within's horrors, which are power-corrupted townsfolk that Matthias takes advantage of to oppose the main crew. And on top of that, they copied the carnival scene where Harper drives through a horde of horrors, including a scene where Devon drives through a horde of mind-controlled/zombified townsfolk.
Noah and Devon's relationship
Their relationship in this '"TV show" has suspicious similarities to their friendship/romance routes in ILW. They made Devon be redfield Noah's anchor to reality, and even had Devon use memories to help ground Noah, which we showed in the cabin scene where Devon and Noah play baseball together. And I know there were Noah x Devon shippers outside of me before ILW released, but it was never PB's plan to canonize them. So the fact that they are seemingly changing course to canonize them after they grew so popular in the fan version feels a bit too coincidental.
Scraping fan art for their AI animation frames
But what's even more egregious is that they have even stooped to scraping from fan artists, who have nowhere near the same following or exposure as our project does. Seriously, what are the odds that the MC they choose to use matches this artist's MC's race, gender, hair, and outfit exactly, that they used Noah's old outfit, that they are literally positioned on the same sides of the image? It's blatant plagiarism, and it's despicable. @errajay I'm so sorry they did this.
These are the biggest similarities, but considering that it was only like 15 minutes of content, that means that a high percentage of the story was stolen. Sure, the exact details of "Silas's" plan are different (he's like a horcrux for the "entity" aka power and he was split into 43 parts and Noah's one of his parts and he needs to kill him to get it back and be free or something) it's the same concept: immortal man who's trapped making a complicated ritual requiring sacrifice while manipulating people to get everything into place.
If you want to see for yourselves, please find it on YouTube. Do not support them with clicks or traffic on their app. Thank you! Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering, no AI was used in the drafting of this post 💖
