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It appears as if things have turned out just fine for DoomRL, Jupiter Hell and Kornel Kisielewicz. Because even though things looked rather dark and hopeless less than one week ago (on the 1st of December, Kornel Kisielewicz received a trademark request e-mail from ZeniMax Media). Well, things have now been solved since DoomRL has now become DRL (the DoomRL code has also been shared with the whole world, open source baby!). Simply put, this was done in-order to avoid any legal trademark problems with ZeniMax Media (keywords, logs, meta tags and so on). That´s also why the former DoomRL site has been remade and renamed as well.

Funny enough though, Kisielewicz didn´t plan to make DoomRL open source so soon. However, he was more or less forced to do so due to the DoomRL trademark issues with ZeniMax:

“I planned to release the source code of DoomRL as a ‘thank you’ after a successful Jupiter Hell Kichatarter [sic], but ZeniMax forced my hand.” – Kornel Kisielewicz, DoomRL co-creator

Furthermore, it also seems like Jupiter Hell is home safe (it´s the spiritual successor to DoomRL). As ZeniMax made no demands to remove the game from Kickstarter. In other words, “if” Jupiter Hell reaches it´s 60,000 pounds Kickstarter goal on time (there is about 14,000 pounds missing at this time, with six days left on the clock). Then ZeniMax will leave the game alone, and I truly hope that´s the case. As it would be a darn shame if Jupiter Hell had to be shut down even though the game had been fully funded. Oh well, time will tell. Another thing that´s worth pointing out is that there exists a drone racing league (DRL for short). So I hope that DRL (aka “DoomRL”) won´t run into any future trademark problems due to the game´s new name…

Sources:
Kornel Kisielewic
Jupiter Hell
DRL
Rockpapershotgun

Robin “V-Act” Ek
The Gaming Ground
Twitter: @TheGamingGround