F13: The Whole Sad Story
Inside the making and unmaking of Friday the 13th: The Game.
The moment Gun Media signed the agreement that turned Slasher Vol. 1: Summer Camp into Friday the 13th: The Game, the project was doomed. Caught in the crossfire of a legal battle that had nothing to do with video games, one of the greatest multiplayer horror titles ever made would have to be scuttled, simply by virtue of its association with the Jason IP.
But for seven and a half magical years, fans of the Friday the 13th films—and the legions of new fans who discovered them through Gun and IllFonic’s game—had a ball hangin’ out at Camp Crystal Lake. It wasn’t just a game to be won or lost: it was a virtual hangout for horror fans to swap stories, share movie recs, and forge lifelong friendships. It became a Friday-night ritual for months and even years, especially when the occasional Friday the 13th rolled around on the calendar.
Next year will mark the 10-year anniversary of the game’s launch, and it’s bound to be a bittersweet one. A24’s Crystal Lake TV series will have come and gone; players still have games like Halloween, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Dead by Daylight to keep the asym-horror flame burning.
Yet there hasn’t been a Friday the 13th movie since 2009’s Platinum Dunes reboot. The only way to play the game online is through unofficial, fan-run servers on PC. And Horror Inc., the company that holds the rights to the franchise, continues to twist the knife in court, having set its sights on a new target mere weeks after the death of original Friday screenwriter Victor Miller.
Drawing on my own interviews and reporting for places like Rolling Stone and Fangoria, this is the whole sad story of Friday the 13th: The Game.
Ronnie Hobbs first met Wes Keltner about two decades ago, when they were both working for the Sinclair Broadcast Group. Hobbs wrote game reviews for various magazines, newspapers, and websites. Keltner was a bit of a marketing genius who shared his ambition to do “something bigger” within the gaming space. The two became quick friends, and they’d make an annual pilgrimage to E3, the big Electronic Entertainment Expo in L.A., together.
Keltner knew how to take an idea and sell it, and within two days of launching his own ad agency, American Apparel became his first client. Keltner had pitched them on a virtual store inside the online game Second Life: a player would buy an item of clothing in the game world for their avatar, and American Apparel would ship the physical version of that same product to the user’s doorstep. The concept landed his new agency on the cover of Ad Age and The Wall Street Journal.
In September of 2010, TAO Media Group announced Gun, an internal division dedicated to video-game consulting and marketing. They published Breach & Clear, the first mobile game from Gun Media, on iOS devices in 2013. Developed by Mighty Rabbit Studios—parent company of Limited Run Games at the time—the project was a modest success for Gun.
Its next release, a brawler-style party game called Speakeasy, had a disastrous launch, with a junior producer from Gun describing the gameplay as, quote, “boring” on the official PlayStation Blog. A reviewer for Push Square said it “may well be the worst game on the PS4.”
Fortunately, by the time Speakeasy launched, Gun was already teasing its next big idea: Slasher Vol. 1: Summer Camp.
When Breach & Clear hit the App Store in July of 2013, Gun Media was primarily led by Keltner, Hobbs, and executive producer Randy Greenback, who’d come from Insomniac after working on multiple Ratchet & Clank titles. Keltner told Greenback and Hobbs, “We need to come up with ideas,” and the trio spent the next six months, essentially, brainstorming and doing research.
“Ronnie and I were always having conversations about game ideas and design ideas,” said Keltner. “One of them that we’d had in the past was some type of asymmetrical gameplay, where there’s a powerful killer that’s stalking the rest of the players. And he happened to jot some of those notes down from the discussion that we’d had over lunch.”
There’d been asymmetrical multiplayer games in the past: Left 4 Dead, the fan-made Zombies gametype in Halo 2, Splinter Cell’s Spies vs. Mercs mode. Aliens vs. Predator in particular was a big inspiration for Gun. But there wasn’t a one-to-one example of what they wanted to pull off with their new Slasher project.
“I went back and replayed all the horror games I’ve ever played in my life, and watched a lot of films, and then I said, ‘Hey, we always wanted to make a Friday the 13th game,’” Hobbs told me in 2018. “Obviously, we wanted to make a bunch of other games, too, like Texas and Nightmare. But we really loved Friday. So we came together with this slasher idea, if you will—one killer versus four or five, six, seven people.”
According to Hobbs, one of the original ideas for the game was a group of killer clowns inside a Rob Zombie–esque amusement park or carnival. There was always some trepidation about filmmakers getting offended or litigious, however, and so they figured they might as well make something they really loved—rather than just what they thought was commercially viable. He started developing some rudimentary lore, making lists of names and titles.
Camp Waxahatchee was a name Hobbs liked for a while, but Keltner wanted to keep the branding fairly obvious. They started calling the game Summer Camp, and decided to set it at Camp Forest Green, as a nod to Jason Lives: Friday the 13th Part VI.
With the premise finalized, the team started nailing down the core game design on paper. Summer Camp would center around a single “overpowered monster” controlled by one player, while the rest of the online lobby would be left to try and survive by any means available. Films like Friday the 13th Part 2, Part III, and The Burning offered plenty of inspiration for mechanics. While the Killer preyed on you, you would have various puzzle elements offering you a chance of escape: you’d “have to earn it.”
Sure, a new player might default to simply hiding in a wardrobe for 20 minutes, but that’s not fun for anybody. So instead there would be phones placed at specific locations around the map, and one or two vehicles that you could repair with the proper parts. (As Wes put it, “The car’s always a piece of shit in the film, right?”)
Players needed to have something to do when the Killer wasn’t around, and intuition would guide them—time to find a weapon, find the fuse to fix the phone box, get some gasoline or the keys to the car. As the match went on, the Killer would grow more and more powerful. Counselors might grow more fearful, which at a certain point could make them visible, even through walls, as a red glow off in the distance.
Balancing all of these elements, and getting everything to work in harmony to create the intended experience, would be a serious challenge. And they’d need an experienced, full-time dev team to build it for them. So Gun reached out to Turtle Rock Studios, which was making an asymmetrical monster-hunting game called Evolve. The Turtle Rock folks were too busy to take on Summer Camp themselves, but they recommended IllFonic, a studio in Denver, Colorado, that had supported them on Evolve.
IllFonic was happy to sign on for Slasher Vol. 1, and even more thrilled later on, when Gun got to tell them it had a new title: Friday the 13th: The Game.
With their background in marketing, Hobbs and Keltner knew that making a splash in the increasingly crowded games market was all about packaging. With titles like Evolve and Dead by Daylight on the way, the budding asym-horror genre seemed to have some kind of future, but how big and for how long was anybody’s guess.
Gun didn’t want to announce Summer Camp without some serious nerd cred attached to it. In Hollywood, a script generally gets made when a star director or big-name actor signs on. And this was the heydey of the Kickstarter game—flashy crowdfunded efforts that would go live for a month, collect pre-orders from the public, and then get to work actually making the thing they’d promised. Games like Pillars of Eternity and Night in the Woods had raised serious money this way in 2012 and 2013, and Gun thought horror fans would show up for a Friday the 13th tribute.
To stack the deck in their favor, they started reaching out to slasher-film royalty.
“I always thought Tom Savini was just awesome,” said Keltner. “I can remember as a kid reading Fangoria magazine, and thinking, ‘God, this dude’s so rad. He makes the coolest stuff; he’s like a magician or something.’ And I just happened to email him. ‘Hey, I’ve kinda got this crazy idea. We don’t have our funding together, but have you ever worked on a game? Would you want to work on a game? We could use some help directing maybe some kills, and doing the camera work and stuff.’”
To their surprise, Savini was in right away. He even gave them a cell number for Kane Hodder, who’d played Jason Voorhees in four of the Friday films, starting with Part VII: The New Blood.
“When they asked if I was interested, I certainly was, of course,” Hodder recalled on Halloween 2018. “They told me what the game was going to be, and… it was called Summer Camp. The killer had a different name, and I thought, ‘Well, that sounds familiar*.’* I had done some motion capture for a similar game that never came out, so I was acquainted with the process. And I said, ‘Sure, I’d love to do it.’ I was just flattered and very happy that they thought I should do the motion capture for Jason in the game.”
With two of the big names behind F13 on board—Savini had done the makeup effects for Friday parts one and four—Hodder asked the Gun guys if longtime Friday composer Harry Manfredini would be doing the music. “Yeah, actually,” Wes told him, “that is kind of what we were thinking.” So Hodder texted Manfredini.
“Manfredini was at a horror convention, and bumped into Cunningham,” said Keltner, meaning Sean S. Cunningham, director and producer of the original Friday the 13th film. “And Sean asked him, ‘Hey, are you working on any movies? Are you scoring anything?’ And he’s like, ‘These guys are making a game. It’s a lot like Friday the 13th, but it’s called Summer Camp. You should give those guys a call and see what they’re doing.’ And so Sean reached out. Of course, I thought we were in trouble.”
For a while, the email from Cunningham sat unanswered. Gun wasn’t sure whether it was legitimate or from someone looking to rip off their design doc. It wasn’t long before the phone rang. Cunningham and his legal team had a lot to talk about.
“When you’re a small company, the worst-case scenario is always the first thing that goes through your head,” said Hobbs.
Fortunately, it was all good news. Unbeknownst to the teams at Gun and IllFonic, Cunningham’s own people had been toying around with a video-game prototype at one point. And their vision aligned nicely with what the small Kentucky publisher was trying to do. So well, in fact, that Horror Inc. was going to hand over the license to Jason and the Friday the 13th name.
With a deal in place, the leadership team from Gun and IllFonic flew up to Cunningham’s home to have a celebratory dinner with him and the family. They also filmed some roundtable discussions with Savini, Hodder, and Manfredini, to get the ball rolling on the Kickstarter—which was how they planned to fund the rest of the game’s development.
On October 13, 2015, the Kickstarter campaign went live, along with a fresh trailer announcing that Summer Camp was now Friday the 13th: The Game. The teaser featured voice-over from Jennifer Ann Burton as Pamela Voorhees, Jason’s mother, and showed off some of the 3D environment art IllFonic had done so far. It ended with a look at the first character model for Jason—the menacing zombie design from Part VII.
The month-long campaign drew in 12,218 backers and an initial $823,704. Using BackerKit, Gun continued to take early pre-orders from folks who’d missed the Kickstarter, raising an additional $422,866. The man behind the mask was indeed back.
From the beginning, F13 was shaped in every conceivable way by its identity as a Kickstarter game. It was a very specific idea in a specific time and place: the slasher-game concept had never quite been done before, it was a small indie production with a massive movie license grafted onto it, and the Friday fans would be paying IllFonic’s salaries for a while.
Suddenly, all the creative and technical problems involved with building and maintaining the experience they’d envisioned carried the weight of fan expectations. Generations of horror nerds and moviegoers would bring their own notions of what Friday the 13th was, and what it meant, to their little hide-and-go-seek game. Gun wanted to give the Kickstarter backers everything they asked for and more; IllFonic, a team of 40 or fewer, would have to craft and implement it all one polygon at a time.
When pre-ordering the game through Kickstarter, players had the option to pledge additional funds for special exclusive rewards, like being enshrined in the Virtual Cabin museum mode or tuckerized as a playable Counselor. Since Gun couldn’t use actors’ likenesses without tracking them down and paying them, a mix of all-new original characters and four Kickstarter backers made up the initial roster of Counselors. (This perk cost $10,000 apiece, but games aren’t exactly cheap to make.)
Each Counselor fit into a sort of teen archetype—the Preppy Guy, the Flirty Girl, the Girl Next Door—which would be reflected on their stat sheet. Nobody could hit Jason harder than the Jock, the Rocker Chick wouldn’t scare easily, and the Bookish Girl excelled at making repairs.
For Gun, authenticity was everything—they wanted to make a Friday the 13th game that would be unassailable in the eyes of even the most diehard fan. But the devs at their partner studio had another priority: crafting a fun, balanced experience for the player. This tug-of-war would ultimately prove to be IllFonic’s biggest challenge on the project, but the tension between those two wildly different aims, that fundamental friction, is likely what made F13 such a novel and interesting game. The bosses in charge wanted a slasher movie; the workers making the sausage wanted it to feel good and fair. The events of a Friday the 13th film are anything but fair.
“Gun Media came out to L.A. for E3 in 2016, and I said, ‘Oh, I really want to see it,’” said Larry Zerner, who’d played Shelly in Friday the 13th Part III. “They had rented an apartment near E3. At the time, they didn’t have the money to go into the convention, or couldn’t book it, so they were just in an apartment showing—not even like an alpha level. And so they showed me the thing, and I could see the map, and the map looked cool. But there was no gameplay. They were describing it to me, and in my head I’m like, ‘I don’t know how this is gonna work.’”
Part III happened to be co-creator Ronnie Hobbs’s favorite Friday, so a lot of the early work on the game centered around that movie—including the first completed map, Higgins Haven. Higgins became the primary testing ground for all the Jasons, all the Counselors, and the game’s various features. “Your first map is always the one you spend the most time on,” said Hobbs. They’d scour every frame of footage, every behind-the-scenes still from the film, and make detailed diagrams of the Higgins property, from the dock to the wooden outhouse to the barn where the final showdown takes place. Every piece of geometry or texture was on a list of must-have assets, with any available reference photos; IllFonic would work to ensure that any chair, rug, table, or wardrobe looked like its counterpart from the movie.
“I have a different relationship to the game than most people,” Zerner said. “But for me, just walking around the Higgins Haven map—I was like, ‘Man, I’ve been here.’ And it’s just like being there. Or going in the barn: ‘I’ve been in this barn.’ It brought back memories; that’s how well they had recreated the set.”
The same geeky attention to detail was paid to the all-important Jason Voorhees character models, which were largely outsourced to Art Bully Productions. If the Gun team couldn’t find a photo of Kane Hodder, C. J. Graham, or one of the other Jason actors from a particular angle, they’d reach out to cosplayers and collectors for the most authoritative reference shots they could find.
By design, Jason was a force of nature within the game. Tom Savini’s main role on the project was to provide Gun with pages and pages of creative ways one could murder a young person at Camp Crystal Lake, while Hodder would act out the most viable of those kills with other stuntpeople in the mocap studio. Every object in the game was a bespoke 3D sculpt of some kind, so Savini was limited to what IllFonic could reasonably build, and Jason had to work with whatever made sense for a given environment.
“From the very first session to the very last session was a year and ten months,” Hodder told me. “After the kills, they would get [the mocap data], they would render it, they would put it in the game, and see what they need next. And, you know, some days I was doing like fifty kills in one day of motion capture.”
The Jason player could slash an opponent with his weapon, activate one of the kill animations in his customizable loadout, or carry a Counselor to unique context-kill spots scattered around the map—like the fireplace, a doorway, or even a bird bath. If two Counselors tried to escape in a boat, Jason could pull them into the water, then drown them one at a time with the push of a button.
Meanwhile, any players who had already been eliminated could watch all this play out in spectator mode. This offered a nice break from the action, but it also served as the game’s only real tutorial for the Counselor role. Newer, less skilled players might die early into a match, but they’d learn a lot from watching an advanced player prepare an escape route or bully Jason a bit.
After a lot of playtesting, to discourage spectators from leaving their matches early, the team implemented a lottery system that would choose one of the dead players to respawn as a hero character: Tommy Jarvis, played by Thom Mathews from Return of the Living Dead and Jason Lives.
“I think they called me after all the fans wanted me to be a part of it, somehow,” said Mathews. “Because a lot of it had already been done. My character was like an afterthought. I didn’t do the movements or anything; I just did the voice, and I worked on my image. The first image that they sent me—I don’t know who was doing it, but the guy didn’t even see the movie, or didn’t see a picture of me, because I had dark hair and a five o’clock shadow. So we went back and forth like six times, and ended up with what we have. The jaw was really big, the eyes were too far apart, and I was like, ‘God, guys.’ So he kept tweaking it, and I said, ‘Okay, that’ll do it.’ It was nice of them to give me the option to okay the final image, though.”
The Jarvis character would play an instrumental part in allowing skilled players to unmask and, if the stars aligned, kill Jason to end a match. This required a female Counselor to find and put on Pamela Voorhees’s sweater, located in Jason’s small shack on the edge of the map; for her to stun Jason at the right moment; and for Tommy to deliver the killing blow.
Gun told players they’d have to discover the exact method for killing Jason on their own. “We will never, ever tell you,” said Hobbs during a panel at PAX. According to IllFonic, it took users about 12 hours to puzzle it out.
Another way the Kickstarter helped to shape the game was through the controversial, but undeniably kickass Savini Jason skin. Tom Savini worked with Gun, IllFonic, and eventually Art Bully to come up with a backer-exclusive Jason—something that would look incredible, fit within the existing canon of the Friday movies, and have its own unique set of strengths and weaknesses. Instead of being merely cosmetic, it would also be powerful enough that Kickstarter backers would want to use it. Which inevitably drew pay-to-win accusations toward the devs and players who used it.
Before the final Savini Jason was unveiled, Savini himself let slip that he was designing a, quote, “teenage Jason.” The idea being that, somewhere between the age of 19 and 25, Jason would have been out there lurking in the woods between the original movie and Part 2, where we first see Jason looking like the killer from The Town That Dreaded Sundown. Before “Bag-Head Jason,” Savini and company wondered whether he might have been “Sweater-Head” Jason, wearing his late mother’s tattered sweater as a mask.
This idea was scrapped, however, in favor of something with a little more flair—a design fans might have expected to see in a direct sequel to Jason Goes to Hell.
“This is gonna be crazy, it’s gonna sound weird, but just go with it. It’s going to be Jason after he gets drug into hell,” said Savini. “What if he’s all burnt to a crisp? Maybe he can steal the devil’s weapon.” And so the artists gave Savini Jason a charcoal-black mask, eyes of flame, and a giant pitchfork. When you see it in the game, it makes some kind of sense.
After the game keys and Savini Jason codes started going out to backers, fans noticed a suspicious number of Savini Jasons for sale on eBay—tens of thousands of dollars’ worth.
“With some investigation, we quickly determined that the keys being sold come from a theft at one of our distribution partners,” community director Daniel Nixon wrote in a Reddit post. “The company has worked to resolve the situation, but unfortunately, both we and the company were unaware of the digital portion of the theft until these auctions were brought to our attention. While there is not a never-ending source for these codes, we will be cancelling any unredeemed codes that have been affected by this theft.”
Anybody who’s ever managed a Kickstarter campaign will tell you that it’s a rough gig, from the funding stage to fulfillment, and Friday the 13th: The Game was no exception. “It was like three full-time jobs,” executive director Randy Greenback said at PAX West in 2017. “It was 18-hour days a lot of the time, answering every email, and at the end of it all I think I got pneumonia.”
“He almost died,” said Hobbs, before adding: “It’s not a joke.”
Gun and IllFonic were unprepared when 125,000 players entered matchmaking within the first 30 seconds of the game’s life. They had built the game in a version of Unreal Engine 4 that didn’t support dedicated servers; they had no downloadable content in the pipeline ready to go at launch; they had an epidemic of cheaters flying around maps Silver Surfer–style, and glitching their way onto rooftops, out of Jason’s reach.
The game was broken in fundamental ways, and it needed fixing. Players also wanted more characters, clothing packs, and maps to play on. The dev team had about 40 employees, none of whom were used to this kind of success—being in the proverbial limelight.
“So imagine creating a sci-fi game and having Star Trek or Star Wars as your inspiration, and then having George Lucas just call you and be like, ‘Hey, turn it into a Star Wars game,’” Hobbs told me in 2023. “You’d be like, ‘What?’ So that’s kind of what it was for Friday the 13th, where we didn’t expect it. That wasn’t why we did it. We just truly loved the franchise, and we wanted to make a tribute to it because we didn’t think it would ever happen. It’d been 30 years since the last game. At that point, you basically give up and you go, ‘Well, I guess we better do it ourselves or get as close as we can.’ And yeah, it took off, and obviously millions of people downloaded it and sales went through the roof early on there. As soon as it came out, we were in the top-two bestsellers on the PlayStation Store and Xbox Store.”
Maintaining F13 was a juggling act: releasing the occasional bit of DLC (some free, some paid), fighting fires and squashing bugs, upgrading the game engine and adding dedicated servers, and of course addressing player feedback.
“Balancing a game like this is sort of a farce and a lie,” said game director David Langeliers. “When the sides are so unevenly skewed, you can’t truly balance the game. And so we kind of didn’t worry about that too much. We were more worried about how things felt for the players—not about fairness, but actually about game feel.”
During production, Langeliers had asked the Gun guys how many players should be able to escape per match—not only survive Jason, but find a way out of the map to safety. Gun didn’t want to specify a number. They just said, “Jason should kill a lot of people.” Which is a frustrating answer for a thoughtful game designer, whose job often involves numbers and precision. In the end, IllFonic designed and balanced the game so that roughly three Counselors should be able to escape from any given match.
Jason was “ridiculously overpowered,” as he should be, and all the Counselors were varying degrees of fearful and helpless when confronted with the masked menace. So Jason was often the main focus for the devs, and tuning the rest of the game was a matter of discerning how players truly felt. Feel over fairness was an explicit pillar for the design team: “As a Counselor, does your run speed feel good?” That sort of thing.
Both testers and everyday gamers tended to react in an emotional way to being killed by Jason (or another player trolling them, in the early days), so IllFonic had to decide what feedback was useful and which comments simply meant the game was functioning as intended.
“It doesn’t matter if you win or lose, right?” actor Larry Zerner reflected. “You know, if I’m playing a Counselor and I hide in a cabinet for twenty minutes and quote-unquote ‘win,’ well, that wasn’t any fun. What’s fun is running around, and if Jason takes out your spine—that’s much more fun.”
Langeliers and the team at IllFonic felt similarly, doing away with full “team victories” in favor of team-based objectives and personal victories. So there came a greater sense of risk-versus-reward. Working together would increase the chance of survival for all the Counselors, but the ultimate win condition was something each player would define for themselves: Are you gonna be a hero? Are you gonna repair the boat and slip away without a passenger? Or do you dare to take on Jason and try to kill him?
The game’s matchmaking system lacked complexity at launch, finding players and putting them together on a first-come, first-serve basis. This meant that jumping into a public match with seven strangers could be a real mixed bag, especially while friendly fire was still enabled by default.
“I was actually playing myself a while back, and I became Tommy Jarvis, and another camper killed me, and I was so pissed off,” Thom Mathews recalled. “There was like this subculture of people just going around killing campers—campers killing campers.”
Eventually, the devs made it so that other Counselors couldn’t take you out with a sudden shotgun blast for no reason—though a bad driver might still run you down if you crossed the road at the wrong moment.
They also introduced what they called the Salt Mines. This meant that players who made a habit of leaving their matches prematurely—for example, in the moments before Jason was about to kill them—would accumulate a “Salt rating.” Players with higher Salt ratings would be matchmade together, while those who were better sports would generally get matched first.
Simulated dice rolls, or RNG, were used to handle loot distribution across the map. This, again, created the illusion of randomness, as opposed to total fifty-fifty fairness.
Throughout playtesting, IllFonic experimented with different map sizes, which led to small variants eventually being released in the full game, and would change items like firecrackers and flare guns to be more active in the fight against Jason. Instead of just revealing the Killer’s location, they’d stun him as well. A big group of Counselors bullying Jason isn’t something you’d see in one of the movies, generally, but it made for a great night of online gaming.
From the earliest stages of development, each Jason variant had its own list of unique pros and cons—the early Jasons could run, certain ones performed better in water, some have noticeably less physical strength. But customizable Counselor loadouts and the perk system arrived late, almost as an afterthought.
Because Counselors were at the mercy of the Jason player’s whims so much of the time, being able to tweak their favorite character with extra stat boosts—and chase better ones over time—offered a bit of a progression system, or what IllFonic calls “a metagame,” for the long term.
Langoliers resisted the idea of in-game proximity chat, at first, but it proved to be another big plus for the overall experience. Counselors could coordinate as a team, and it naturally led to a lot of viral videos. It’s hard to keep a multiplayer horror game scary for long, so it may as well be funny or facilitate role-playing. This was one of Friday’s greatest strengths.
For a time, my regular Friday-night group included a director who’s gone on to work for Marvel, Netflix, Sony. And I will never forget the semi-pornographic video clips he’d play mid-match, holding the phone up to his Xbox mic as Jason chased him across the porch of Packanack Lodge.
On June 11, 2018, Gun published a press release titled “End of Content.” The ongoing litigation between Friday screenwriter Victor Miller, who sought to reclaim ownership of his original screenplay, and Sean Cunningham’s Horror Inc. would bring a halt to the franchise. Which included Friday the 13th: The Game.
Cunningham and his people asserted that Miller had written the Long Night at Camp Blood treatment and script on a work-for-hire basis—that he had been an employee. Miller’s camp claimed that he had been an independent contractor, and that many elements of the original film—not the adult Jason in the hockey mask, but just about everything else, had been his invention. Miller’s notice of termination led to a volley of lawsuits, countersuits, and appeals. The years-long legal battle ultimately ended in a big victory for working screenwriters.
“I knew it was coming. As a copyright lawyer now, we knew this date was coming, where the termination would happen and they couldn’t offer anything,” Zerner said in 2018. “And so I was trying to think of ways that they could get around it, but just couldn’t do it. And part of the problem is that the judge took so long to rule on what was going on. Sean filed the lawsuit [against Miller] in August of 2016, there were motions heard in October of 2017, and usually when you file these motions for summary judgment, you get an answer in a month, maybe two months.”
The intellectual property had become a tangled mess over the years as the films passed from Paramount to New Line Cinema, and then to Platinum Dunes. Miller’s claim and Cunningham’s lawsuit had far-reaching implications beyond the F13 business, but it also meant that the pieces of the Friday branding and mythology might be divvied up in the divorce, so to speak. For almost a year, both parties awaited a ruling from the judge; Gun and IllFonic kept their heads down and hoped the proceedings wouldn’t affect their game.
“So what does this mean, exactly?” Gun said in the June 11 blog post. “There will be no additional content added to Friday the 13th: The Game. This includes ‘Uber Jason,’ the Grendel map, Jason kill packs, clothing, emotes, and new Counselors.” The prior December, IllFonic had updated the game with a playable Shelly based on Zerner’s likeness, offline bots, and a Virtual Cabin 2.0 experience, which confirmed the addition of the Jason X Killer and a Grendel starship environment.
“There were discussions that were had, but nothing was ever matter-of-fact. It was always like, ‘Well, the judge still hasn’t ruled, so we don’t know anything. Everything’s kind of up in the air,’” Keltner explained. “We’ve got a live game on the market, there’s a ton of people playing it, and they all want new shit. So we were just bustin’ ass to build as much stuff as fast as we could.”
The game would be put into maintenance mode that September, with Japan’s Black Tower Studios taking over the project from IllFonic. Two years later, the game’s dedicated servers were decommissioned in favor of peer-to-peer matchmaking, and the game would eventually be delisted from digital storefronts in 2023.
“I wasn’t surprised, knowing what the franchise has been through. It didn’t shock me. But we were surprised at that moment—we were told it wouldn’t affect us, you know?” said Hobbs. “Larry [Zerner] thought that, and we all thought that, and that’s what we were told. Then one day you wake up, and it does affect you. We’re not always privy to every conversation that happens between the other parties. We’re just here making a game, based on their IP, and we just kind of have to do what we’re told. So we were disappointed, but at the same time, you can only control what you can control.”
On December 31, 2024, I was playing a public match as Deborah Kim on the Camp Crystal Lake map. My main group of Friday buddies and I had convened on December 13, and maybe one other night that month, for one or two final glorious sessions. There’d been a lot of dancing around the campfire at Higgins Haven, Jason standing there and looking too sad and confused to kill anybody.
But the night the game went dark, I jumped into matchmaking with some randoms and took a last, long look at my favorite horror game. I was headed into the boathouse on the east side of the Crystal Lake map when the ethernet-port icon popped up. It wouldn’t let me interact with any doors or containers. The screen went black, and it read: “Error. Session heartbeat failure.”
Talk about the end of an era.
In the first two months that Friday the 13th: The Game was live, Blu-ray and DVD sales for the series grew by 1,857%.
For a certain demographic, my nine-year-old son included, Jason and Leatherface and Michael Myers are no longer faces you’d see on forbidden tapes at the video store; they’re characters in their respective games. They’re Fortnite skins and Dead by Daylight DLC.
“There’s a whole new generation of people for whom their very first experience with Friday the 13th was interactive,” Kelter said. They were in it. And they died in the Higgins barn; they died in Pinehurst. We hear a lot of those stories: ‘My dad loves these movies, and it brought us together. I play the game, and he sits and watches me and laughs and points things out.’ We’ve had three couples get engaged in our game.”
At horror conventions, droves of young people will approach Kane Hodder’s table and ask him to sign somethin’—not from any movie. But because he’s the guy who killed them in the video game.
“I think we did it right,” said Hobbs. “We handled the source material with care.”
Fans have made various efforts to resurrect the game through full-featured mods with online play and restored content, like the Jason X characters and the Grendel map. One such project was issued a cease-and-desist letter from Horror Inc. days before its scheduled release.
On August 28, 2026, Gun Interactive responded to a new lawsuit from Horror Inc., this time aimed at the video-game publisher itself. The rights holder alleges that Gun withheld upwards of $4 million in unpaid royalties throughout the game’s lifespan. The publisher disputes this, saying Horror Inc. received “every dime” of the more than $18 million it was owed.
“Gun wanted to partner with Horror Inc. to remaster the game and give it a real second life,” the statement reads. “Instead of taking that path, Horror Inc. let the license lapse, ending the game. It was pulled from storefronts and the servers went dark, even after Gun offered to [pay] to keep them running… Gun intends to fight this lawsuit. We will not be bullied by the threat of expensive litigation into paying Horror Inc. a penny more than it was owed. We have been pushed around in this partnership more than is fair, and we’ve carried the burden in the public eye long enough. This time we’re pushing back.”
Jason will return in Crystal Lake, a new series from A24 and Peacock, on October 15.