Sadness: A Long Rambling of Someone Who Has Read Way Too Much About This Non-existent Game

Over the years, and ever since I have got interested in Lost Media (media that is not available to the public, has gone missing over the years, or no longer exists), I have thought a lot about Sadness, what I thought to be one of gaming communities' holy grails.

Sadness was, at one point, a survival horror game (a sub-genre of video games that has the goal of freighting the player through horrific images and/or a scary ambience with a focus on surviving these horrors with limited resources) developed by Polish developer Nibris, stylized as NIBRiS. It was one of the earliest titles announced for the new and revolutionary Nintendo console the Wii. It was so early to the same that when the game was announced the console was still called Revolution.

One of the earliest articles I have been able to find about the game, is from GoNintendo posted on March 7, 2006. The article, which no longer exists but has been archived, details what people knew about the game back then. Piotr Ortowiski, a member of Nibris, called the game a gothic horror which will "scare not with the amount of blood but the sheer atmosphere."

I find it very interesting, at this point, they already call it a gothic horror. Also called gothic literature, this a genre of books commonly characterized by the fear and threat of the supernatural while the past invades the present. The theme of past and present being its most distinguishing characteristic, making use of decaying buildings to covey this atmosphere. It is like Dark Souls, but for 18th and 19th snobs, just like Bloodborne.

The reason why I find this interesting ties in with the setting and focus of Sadness. The game focused on a Victorian-era Polish-Hungarian aristocrat called Maria Lengyel who has to protect her son Alexander after the train they were traveling derails on its way Lviv. This ambiance of being lost on the way to somewhere, protecting an innocent, with a focus on mental health is often what gothic horror focuses upon. Although not always successful, the focus on one's mental state, death, decay, and fear have always been a huge part of gothic tales, which often focus of what may be considered an outcast even if said outcast is not always seen in a positive light. The references of mental health are also present in Ortowiski's words "Let me mention that the scenario will have associations with narcolepsy, nyctophobia and paranoid schizophrenia." which would make the game fairly close to a gothic horror. A mother struggling in the (now) Ukrainian countryside trying to guide her son to safety seems like a fantastic way to explore adult themes in a video game, much Silent Hill had done before it, and this point in time we are in a drought of Silent Hill.

The article also details a bit of the gameplay Nibris wanted for their game. A experience where the player would have to use whatever they find on the floor to fight, and where you would use the motion control of the Wii to scare off rats with a torch or slit someone's throat. You would also have to have rope to climb up a wall and would have to use the controller to lasso it on the wall itself.

The team talked big and seemed very ambitions over the game they were creating, telling the press at the time that "The scenario will surprise you." as if we had never seen anything like this game. A survival horror game about a mother in a historical pre-WWI setting that would touch upon the inability to regulate your sleep-wake cycles and the fear of the night.

Another article by IGN, released on the day after and written by Matt Casamassina, details even more about what Nibris was doing at the time.

The team consisted of 14 people, according to Orlovsky himself, and they mostly had experience with PC game and, despite not having a publisher, had gained access to Nintendo GameCube development kits. He goes on to say that the team makes games for pleasure that that Nintendo's consoles are the only ones able to realize the ideas that the studio has.

"We do not make games for money, but for sheer pleasure. We create games which we would like to play, but they are missing from the market. Our games are only for Nintendo - only DS and Revolution can realize our visions"

"However we want the games to provide entertainment in the first place. Our aim is to make the player feel emotions and feelings. We desire real smiles, sadness, fear and tears. We believe we are able to achieve this."

Despite this, the article notes that Nibris wanted to keep Sadness a secret, and goes on to cite the game information that the GoNintendo article did, with no more information about the game. It is heartwarming the way Orlovsky boasts about following Nintendo and how much the team adores art and is not here to take away money from players. As beautiful as this, I believe we were cynical enough in 2006 to realize that games, even as Art, do not survive without our money. It is nonetheless admirable that this sentiment was present in talks the team had with the press. I do not think that none of us was old enough or cynical enough to not be taken away by these words. As matter of fact, Sadness created a lot hype.

In April 2006, it was released to the public that Sadness was to be in black and white. I imagine this would seem like a bold move back in the 2006. We had coloured games for about 16 years (if going by the SNES, although I am sure someone will tell me they existed before that) and, for what I remember not many games existed back them like this. Madworld, a black and white Wii title by PlatinumGames, would only come out in 2009.

In a citation from Advanced Media Network Wii, Nibris boldly proclaims:

"We decided to follow Nintendo's path, which definitely fights the stagnation which has occurred in video games, and creates new trends. With this move, we want to create a unique environment, which is only available in Sadness."

Sampling this environment that they wished to create is art, as the only video we have that 100% belongs to the game is a E3 live action concept trailer:

The trailer, no doubt, kept the imagination of many people going. The aesthetic of a Victorian-era woman who can be controlled by the player in such a novel way as the Wii's is fascinating. Even without the themes that the team had mentioned thus far, this is an impressive concept trailer. But it is just that, as everything else that Nibris had told the press, a concept. Nobody was sure how far in development the game was. Nobody even knew if the game had publisher.

In July 27, 2006 IGN published an article by Micah Seff mentioning that the game has a publisher, but this publisher is just as mysterious as the game itself. They are not Atlus (mostly known by the Shin Megami Tensei series) or Majesco (Advent Rising, BloodRayne, A Boy and His Blob, Drake of 99 Dragons), which were rumoured at the time to be the published of the game. This was a mysterious publisher who had not yet allowed them to show off how the game looked like. They also reveled that were not going to give the press any more information about the game's scenario, claiming that the game is too novel for the fun to be spoiled.

"Sadness is a novelty on the video games market. Both the story and the presentation of the game is going to be a surprise for a player," claims Adam Artur Antolski, one of the game's scriptwriters, "You must forgive us the fact that we present such scarce information about Sadness, but we hope that once you play it you will understand our circumspection. We do not want to spoil the fun."

 Despite this, Nibris, and probably Antolski himself, told IGN that the game aimed to look and feel different from other Wii games. It was not child friendly, an image that Nintendo had long been holding on to. The black and white graphics, rather than being an artistic choice, were to create more photorealistic graphics that could, potentially, better the scary atmosphere. One more remember, this is 2006. Madworld was not yet, No More Heroes would only come out in 2007, and we were years away from stylized black and white indie games like Return of Obra Dinn, Neverending Nightmares or Limbo. As such, IGN mentions that the game could be very different from anything else in the market, at least visually.

In the same article, we are made aware of two other teams that have joined forces with Nibris: Frontline Studios (who were experienced with the Wii) and Digital Amigos (responsible for creating the visuals of the game). A demo reel for Digital Amigos still exists online.

Furthermore, Nibris told IGN that they were consulting with many other people outside of the team, including psychologists and horror authors. The validity of this statement will likely never be known.

Finally, the team, through Piotr Bietalowicz, reveal that the game will have no HUD or a menu system. It will all be done "realistically", to amplify feelings of horror in the player. They were aiming to make the usage of the Wiimote as realistic as possibility and would even hide the saving from the player.

"We are aiming at completely intuitive behaviour of the player - just as in life. Every choice a player makes is essential - if you experience traumatic events in your life, they are with you all the time. This will be the same in Sadness. We want the player to feel that he is participating in events, not merely playing a game"

 While the movement is meant to be intuitive, for example you would use an umbrella exactly like you would in real life, I cannot help but to think that the game would make for a very frustrating experience for most people. While realism may seem very nice, the team's every bold statements make me only think about frustrating playing Sadness must be. This would probably go beyond Pathologic levels of frustration into infinity. Which leads me to hypothesis that most of this was told to the press to keep interest in the game, rather than being true. I do not have any proof of this, but is not a habit in videos games to hype up a game as much as possible to make the community interested in it only to be crushed by the reality that is making a game playable and the technology of the time. We all remember Fable.

Interestingly enough, at this point, IGN had the release date of the game as 31st of December 2007 in Europe.

In a post from Cube3 from 2007, the storyline of the game finally comes to light. Or at least some of it. While I cannot find any evidence of it, an issue of Game Informer published the information. This would likely be the first time that the players would be hearing about the main character Maria, and her younger brother Alexander. They both suffered a terrible train accident in which Alexander was blinded. He begins to act strangely (likely linking back to the mental health themes already mentioned), but both must survive their environment. The game was meant to have 10 ending and be as long as 15 hours with a release date in 2008. Further more, Alexander would give his mother hints about how to progress.
No, I did not made a typo. During a lot of the Sadness discourse you will hear that Alexander is Maria's son, however, at some point, he was her younger brother. The fact this forum post has the two mention in the same date may be a typo. Where this typo comes from is hard to say, however this is far from the first time I hear this version of the story. Unfortunately, I could not find the aforementioned issue of Gamer Informer.

From 2007 onwards, Nibris would gather much criticism from the gaming press because they did not present any gameplay, screenshots, or proof that Sadness existed. The team kept telling everyone to not worry, the game 100% exists, but as the years went by, patience was running out. A good example of this is an exasperated article by Nick Chester for Destructoid.

The article opens with the above image, showcasing artwork presumably of a possessed or evil Alexander, with text asking Nibris to start a devianEART account (deviantART being a, at the time, popular art posting site for both professionals and hobbyists) and only come back to the press once they have a game.
While this may seem rude and even dismissive now, I cannot help but share an understanding of the feelings of frustrating everyone was feeling back in 2007. At that time, were still watching 3D Realms run out of money every 6 months trying to get Duke Nukem Forever done, a game started development in 1997 and only came out in 2011. Both being highly awaited games, and some could not help but draw comparisons between both games.

The article links to two pages, an archived blog of "reasonably well-connected "Suffer Girl"" where she mentions that Nibris rebuked publisher interest when they asked to see a game, and a NeoGaf thread.

Although the blog author mentions that this was not recent, it is telling (at least to me), that the team refused to show a playable version of the game. It is hard to guess how popular this article was, but they were not the only ones with this sentiment. The NeoGaf has this written all over it as well. Despite not being very long, the thread shares the same feelings of frustration and also theorizes that the game may be vaporware (a piece of software that is announced but never released). In a longer thread, forum members talk about not only Sadness, but a Nintendo DS title the same team would be working on called Children of the Night. This information comes from two Cubed3 articles. The interview with Nibris seems to be lost to time and not a lot was achieved, the other one is a short announcement regarding Children of the Night. Interestingly enough the second ones has a comment from (apparently) Nibris themselves talking about how Sadness is almost finished.

ROTR is another of the DS games, Raid over the River. One that may have existed at some point, if the commenters on that small article are to be believed.

NeoGaf seems to have a lot of interesting things to say about Sadness. From the user jesusraz posting a information and links from Cubed3, from users suggesting that Cubed3 is marketing Nibris or they have been fooled by the Polished developer. jesusraz, who is in fact the director of Cubed3 Adam Riley, posts an article about Double Bloob.

Double Bloob was a DS title devolved by Nibris, in the style of Pang or Super Buster Bros. In the comments, Nibris is once again found commenting, thanking Riley for his coverage and clarifying that it will be different from Pang and that the game showcased in the article is just a tech demo.

Double Bloob would be only game Nibris released, on December the 1st 2010 via DSiWare (a service Nintendo offered to download games and softwares unto their DSi console).

To make matters even more hilarious, during 2007 Nibris sent Cubed3 artwork that supposedly had as a concept for their game Children of the Night, however, this turned out be art completely unrelated to the game, but it was art from their in-house artist who also did art for Sadness. NeoGaf caught wind of this and thought that Nibris stole the art from a random Polish artist, only to find the guy's devianART page and find out that he did the art for Sadness.

Nibris also comment on the article, the comment as since between lost to time as it was deleted at their own request.

He has not used his dA for a very long time but it seems that he has since moved on and did art from Crysis 2 and the cover for the Warhammer book Sons of Ellyrion series.

Thanks to Riley a video of RotR, a game that never came out, also was saved for posterity.

From here, the information gets hazy and hard to find. Perhaps, Nibris, by this point, had given up, but kept insisting that the game was real, as they do in a Kotaku article by Leigh Alexander. In the information saved by this article, Fog Studios, a partner of Nibris, guarantees that game exists.

"Obviously there's only so much I can say. I can tell you for sure that the project is real, they're actively developing it. There's no publisher for the game yet and as such it's impossible for us to say when the game is going to be released. Basically, that's the official statement."

The main problem seems that they could not find a publisher. At this point, the seemingly had lost the secret publisher they had, or never had one and simply wanted to convince everyone that they did so that fans did not lose faith in the game.

Despite this, we know, from an archived article from n-europe, that Frontline Studios dropped Nibris around April 2007.

"Hello Ryan, I can confirm that FRONTLINE is no longer interested in developing Sadness game based on Nibris' concept, and also Nibris is not authorized to claim anything on behalf of FRONTLINE. Best regards, Marcin Machel"

 Another article from n-europe, documenting another of Nibris promises to show us something, also mentions their YouTube channel. I have found said channel, or what it may be the channel, however, it is scrubbed of all its videos (if it ever had any) and contains only a description.

The most interesting part is the promise that something would come in 2010. But nothing came in 2010. As you may know right now, nothing ever came.

Before continuing, I would like to go through some information I have found on gamesindustry.biz article. While it does mention a lot of the information we already know, it also elaborates on a lot more that is nowhere else.

In the article, they elaborate on Sadness' influence numbering names like Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Planescape: Torment, ICO, and Phantasmagoria. The games mentioned are either horror games, or games with strong ambience and a focus on story. Planescape: Torment is often cited as the or one of the best video games ever made, an ever complex tree of dialogues with no real guidance to the player. This, and ICO are the most revealing games regarding Sadness. ICO is a game where a young boy with horns tries to save a girl from a doomed fate by holding her hand throughout a vast castle with very little words. The ambience, and the mechanic of holding a character's hand and calling them to safety or even to complete puzzles seem like to be a big influence in Nibris. Almost like someone in the team played the same and said "yeah, I wanna do but that but H O R R O R". The presence of games like Silent Hill, Eternal Darkness, and Phantasmagoria are a clear statement of the team's desire to explore mental illness and the effects it has on the human mind. All of these games explore them in some way, and while I have not played Eternal Darkness, I can see how the now very famous mirages that the main character sees when her sanity is low would have influenced Sadness.

The article also elaborates that the monsters are inspired by Slavic legends, but the player may never see all of them, it depends on their choices. What exactly this means, is left to interpretation. It could be that you encounter different monsters depending on your choices or depending on the path you chose you encounter different monsters. Maybe the game would have some sort of side quests that would aid in this? 

The article also mentions the only enemy from the game we know by name, a werewolf.

Although there was another monstrous enemy showed in artworks, I do not believe we know its name or role in the story. My tries to find a connection between it and Slavic mythology were in vain, but I have limited knowledge and resources I can use since I do not speak any Slavic language.

It does look like a feminine figure, wearing a ruined skirt, with some wavy hair on the back of its head and long nails. Although obscured, it seems that its feet are positioned as if it wearing high heels, something that has been associated with women for the last few centuries. Is this Maria then? Maybe a transformation she through due to her own struggles? Or this a monster representing Maria and her suffering, in a Silent Hill 2 inspiration? Maria does uses skirts, or at least dresses, and her hair seems to be wavy. I could not help but to notice that the monster's "eye" looks like a vagina, was the game going to have themes of childbirth and/or sexuality in same way Silent Hill 3 had?

Whatever they wished to do wit these concepts, and if I am even thinking in line with the original plan for the game, is hard to know. It is even hard to know who drew these. I suspect there were at least two different artists working on Sadness due to the difference in art styles in some of the concept art that survived the sands of time, however, it could be just the same artist employing different art styles. It is to note, that while OmeN2501 drew Maria and the werewolf, he was never mentioned as the artist working on Sadness, but on their DS game Children of the Night.

unseen64 has a great article on the game, detailing some plot details and summarizing what was known about the game. Before putting the final nail in the coffin, I would like to go through these and see what the plot of Sadness could have been like.

Maria Lengyel was traveling by train to somewhere in Eastern Europe, some sources, as we have seen, claim that she was traveling to Lviv with her family when the train derails. Polish sources also claim that the exact location of the derailment is not know, while we know that English sources mention Ukraine by name.

When the train derails, Alexander is blinded which caused him to suffer from narcolepsy, schizophrenia and nyctophobia. It is interesting to note, in Polish, Alexander is called Aleksander or Aleks, Aleks simply being a shorten version of these names. These are common in Slavic countries. While not wanting to speculate too much, there may be an effort from Nibris to westernize the names of the characters. We also see that the examples that they have given of illnesses that affect or are connected with mental health are connected with Alexander and, possibly, his own trauma of being blinded and separated from his mother.

After the train derails, Maria passes out. When she wakes up, she sees men dresses in black killing the survivors of the train accident. Her husband and other children have already passes away, so she decides to look for Alexander. The translation also noted that Maria would have had two other children, this was never present in any of the articles. In fact, articles in English detailing the plot, are few and are between.

Some articles mention that the game takes place before WWI, like the English articles that I have read, however, in Poland there were articles mentioning that the game happens during WWI. This would give Maria and her family a believable reason to flee Poland. But, if the game happens in the outbreak of WWI, it could be as believable to the average person. Without an actual script of the game, it is hard to know what would be the reason for them leaving.

Fights were rare, but player was supposed to use stealth, exploration, and other ways to ensure Maria's survival. This is in almost opposition to what the English press had, where the information granted was that Maria would have to find random objects to find. Here we see an emphasis in a more Clock Tower style of gameplay.

There were cutscenes planned, but it is unclear if there were actually made in engine. With leads me to a few curious images.

It is very hard to know if these are mock-ups of what they game could have looked like or if these are actual proof that a game indeed existed at some point in time, or even of a build have existed.

There were also NCPs that Maria could have talked to. How these would have been used, we do not know. It is likely that these could have been used to give Maria some rest from the horrors she would have faced, exposit on what is happening through hits or riddles, or simply provide her with side quests.

According to the sources cited on unseen64, there were eight endings planned, as opposed to the ten the English-speaking press were told about. Each ending had a different message and they would judge the player's actions. It seems that the most important element to achieve the different endings was how the player treated Alexander and took care of his physical and mental-well being.

While not cited as inspirations, games like Haunting Ground and Rule of Rose came out before Sadness was announced. These are games were young women must take care of a dog, who is dependent on them but will help them. In Haunting Ground, how the protagonist Fiona and, by extension, the player takes care of the dog Hewie influence the ending of the game. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories only came out in 2009, however, Silent Hill 2 employed similar mechanics had been out for a few years. Yet, none of the games that were out by 2007 judge the played for their choices. It seems that Sadness would have been ahead of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories in that department.

Perhaps these even tie-in with the evil Alexander artbook that Destructoid had previously used for their statement. If you do not treat Alexander well enough, or neglect a part of his well-being, he would have become possessed or partly possessed by a great evil. Maybe this could even be the monster shown in the concept art. At this point, Silent Hill 4: The Room had already done this, but I would be nonetheless curious about how they planned to pull this with a eight-year-old child.

Nibris kept this so secret, we know very little about the plot, to the point that unseen64 mentions that there were multiple plots, including one were Alexander was Maria's brother, another one were Alexander lost his sight.

The most reveling thing about Nibris and the final nail the coffin was an interview n-europe had with an ex-member of the team, Adam Artur Antolski.

According to Antolski, the team was composed of people with little to no experience. Some, like Antolski himself, were underage and were involved with a Polish Nintendo fansite. He worked with them for about a year and, when he left, only one 3D object had been completed: a minecart. There were design documents, and scripts, but there was no actual game. There were disagreements about even the plot. Antolski believe that gamers would not be interested in the mother-son dynamic, but above all else, he believed that Alexander was annoying.

"Despite the fact we disagreed a lot, for example about Alexander, son of the main heroine. I was against including him into a game - I believed that most gamers wouldn't really be interested in such a mother-son dynamic, and I thought it wouldn't make the game any more challenging or deep, just more annoying. Especially as, in the early days, Alexander was a crybaby, and the gamer would be forced to taking care of his every single need, every time he was scared or frightened. It is an interesting idea when you listen to it, but not very playable - it slows action, story, and makes identification with the heroine more difficult."

 While clearly inspired by ICO, the game did not work like ICO. The player would have to take care of Alexander, likely in connection to the endings, and this could very well be annoying to players. One must remember that one of the most hated types of gameplay is the escort mission, where the player through the playable character must guide another often defenceless character from point A to point B. While ICO's gameplay is an escort mission, a 100% playthrough takes about 8 hours. The game is small. Not only that Yorda, the girl the protagonist is escorting, has her own AI and will wander and even point out solutions to puzzles if left alone. From what I can gather from Antolski's words, one would have to actively take care of Alexander, rather than it being a Yorda situation, where he would actively help you in some situations even if you had to defend him from monsters.

The confusion between the game taking place in Lviv or on the way to Lviv is also explained by Antolski. Most scriptwriters thought that Liviv was too close to civilization and wanted the game to take place in the countryside or somewhere isolated. He believed Lviv was perfect, however, at some point the setting was changed to the woods in Ukraine. This change is, maybe, shown in the concept art that still exists online.

According to the interview, the development was troubled. Even though it seemed like the game would enter development a few times, it seems that the project never had an actual leader and, as a result, it was constantly failing apart. Not only that, Nibris themselves had issues with Frontline, not only with creative differences or with the deadlines, but the script itself was an issue.

"We had deadlines from them which we couldn't work and they had many, I mean really many, problems with our script, and it was just like a nightmare - not only because we couldn't discuss sensible compromise inside of our team, but because someone from the outside wanted to change a couple of things. Everyone now knows how it ended. But, I think there was more of them, than the entire Nibris team at the time! It was because of those deadlines. They just didn't take us seriously."

The team, or at least parts of the team, were not aware of the negative press they got because of Sadness and did not care about it. They were not taken seriously, not by Frontline, nor by the press, and not even by their fans after a certain point.

Antolski also elaborates more the story of Maria Lengyel and how the game would play, giving interesting titbits about the game and the concepts he had scripted.

"The main character, Maria Lengyel, a woman of Polish-Hungarian roots was supposed to arrive in Lviv, and the city was supposed to change in the bare moonlight into a somewhat gore-covered place. The location is isolated, so that the character cannot just leave - which we found a little hard to make sound reasonable about a city. The main heroine would see visions, which were supposed to include her memories from the past, therefore the player wouldn't be sure if she really was seeing monsters or if she was just mentally insane."

"Well, we wanted players to have absolute control over the heroine - be able to use any kind of item as a weapon, due to the lack of guns. And we wanted to make it as realistic as possible, like you could for example break a bottle and use the pieces of glass like a knife, or a chair leg like a bat. If you were going to grab some person from behind, you would "catch" him using the Nunchuck and cut his throat using the Wii Remote."

 The interview with Antolski was very revealing. It told the English press things that, likely, they did not know, but confirmed their suspicions. Sadness never really existed, there was no game, and it would never come out.

However, there is a video on YouTube which shows a very low-res video of someone playing what seems to be Sadness.

It is quite possible that when Antolski left only the minecart was done and, afterwards, a playable demo was created in order to drum up some hype for the game. It is impossible to say if the video is even real. I have seen people calling it out online because of the type of TV used or because there are wires that seem to lead to a controller. But we have to remember that Antolski himself said that he only knew of the team having a Gamecube kit and Nibris themselves said they wanted to get the Wii development kit, not they got it. I, however, do not know the validity of the video, nor can I confirm it. But, if real, it is possible that there is a build of the game floating around in Poland. We know that the scripts and concepts must be, if they have not been lost forever by now.

By 2010, the Sadness official website had changed to a simple message in Dutch, likely indicating that the website may have been taken over by someone else. However, vague information about the game itself was kept in it, even if the website offers you to play poker.

In 2012, the website was once again updated, now containing more information about the game, including a now dead link to download the OST of the game.

It is hard to say if the website was actually controlled by Nibris. The website has a link under "Developer interview" with the interview with Antolski copy pasted in it. I am not sure that, if I was Nibris I would like to have such damning information in the official website of my game, but like most things about this story, it is hard to tell.

There is also a section called "Factsheet" which is now completely broken but has the same information as gameindustry.biz.

While this version of the website may have contain some important and interesting information at some point, it is now broken and most of the images no longer work. Curiously, one of the sections just has the cover of Eternal Darkness in it.

Maybe, by 2012, with the game being dead, the official website became evaded by advertisements that did not belong there and requests to advertise on the website. By 2014, however, the website for Sadness was completely gone. It was taken over by completely unrelated things until it was completely gone from the internet. In 2019, the website was nothing more than a 502 Bad Gateway error.

The Nibris website, unfortunately, is just as broken. However, I really do love the hiring proposal to put "your mad graphic skills to use".

They also promise that they would be a the Game Convention Expo in 2008, something that they seem to have missed, like most of their appearances in conventions after E3 2006.

The website would then be abandoned and then taken over by unrelated things, where it stands to this very day.

By 2010, everyone was sure that Nibris was never going to make Sadness. Two article by James Stephanie Sterling for Destructoid document this fall.

The first one, documents the closure of the Sadness official website. Nibris did not comment on it, leading Sterling to theorize that, while Nibris was once a real developer, it was now long gone.

The second article, mentioning that Nibris no longer makes games and became part of the European Center for Video Games. N-Europe and GoNintendo also reported on this.

And it is here, in October 2010, that the first mentions of the name Bloober Team are found. The developer that would rise from the ashes of Nibris, although they had been founded in 2008, likely after the collapse of Nibris and Sadness. Double Bloob seems to have been released under Bloober Team.

But what would happen to Sadness? Well, two things.

In 2014, Hullbreach Studios and Cthulhi Games announced that they wanted to kickstart the game and release it for the WiiU. Randy Freer, confessed to be the IGN user Twilight_Prince who released the screenshots from Sadness to the world. Both himself and Jeremy Kleve were involved unofficially with Sadness for years and very much wished to see the game come out.

"I'm the IGN user Twiilight_Prince, who years ago (before starting HullBreach Studios with my brothers Daniel and Robert Gump) released the only three 100% real screenshots of Sadness thanks to Piotr Bielatowicz. I fought trolls for years, proving the game existed across the internet, while nIBRIS regrettably struggled in development with their Gamebryo programmers at Frontline and their graphics partner Digital Amigos, up until Sadness officially went vapor in 2010. Jeremy Kleve and myself have basically been unofficially involved in Sadness across the last 6 years in the background."

 They mention that, while they want to stay close to the original concept, they also wanted to make it 2D and have a bigger focus on puzzles and introduce RPG mechanics.
However, this was not to be. The two teams never managed to secure the IP, and they were unable to continue work on the game that they had spend so much time cheering on. It seems that there was bit fight for the IP, but nothing ever came of this and the rights may still be with Bloober Team.

In 2021, Bloobler Team released The Medium, a game that was hailed by some as the successor to Sadness. With a protagonist called Marianne who is trying to help a little girl called Sadness, it is hard not to think of a connection between the two games. The team would confirm that The Medium has Easter eggs (little references and secrets for players to find) to their previous games, however, they would not confirm if this was directly a reference to Sadness.

I have not played The Medium, and I can speak little of it. I feel that this quote from Piotr Babieno in an interview with gamesindustry.biz summaries best what happened to Sadness:

"In the end we realised that we don't have the experience," Babieno says, "and the people who we hired didn't have the experience either."

 The OST is said to be the most complete part of Sadness, and even then it was not done. However, it is beautiful and eerie, a fleeting memory of something that never happened.