I'd like to set the record straight concerning Emerald Rocker's subtle jabs and the real behind the scenes at Frozen Utopia.
As far as any of us at Frozen Utopia are concerned and at this current state of development, there is no stolen material in our products. Emerald has been repeating jabs mentioning the
Rolling Stones. Yes we did technically have a Rolling Stones song in Mysterious Song, which was in the original PC version as the town song. It's a sped up version of "As The Tears Go By" with different instruments. None of us were even aware of this until Seldane/FM-77 brought it to our attention around the first beta testing phase in Summer 2007. We didn't see a problem with it at the time since it was remixed and not identical. Besides Japanese developers have gotten away many times by "borrowing" material, such as when
had a song awfully familar to Robert Miles
. Better yet, how about
Breath of Fire III track? Ring any bells to a popular SNES RPG before it?
The fact is that the original designer, coder, and composer of Mysterious Song was a Stones fan and likely made the song as a tribute. Afterall, he did name the song "Tears"
. But even if that weren't enough, our main musician Paranoia_Dragon already started working on a new replacement track after we got feedback from Arkhan that a lot of people at
CCAG Show recognized the Stones reference while demoing the game. This also resulted in us replacing another track that we didn't realize was taken from something else.
Whenever problems like this arrive to our knowledge at Frozen Utopia, we take care of it privately in a mature manner. Emerald_Rocker could've been respectful and brought this to our attention privately, but instead he chose to make a subtle jab about it which provoked arguing.