A while ago, 3d Realms and Iron Maiden’s holding company got into a lawsuit over 3D Realms’ similarly named game, Ion Maiden. The game was made to be an over-the-top futuristic shooter where our protagonist would fight dozens of robots and soldiers in a Duke Nukem or classic Doom style.
Well it seems that 3D Realms weren’t able to settle the lawsuit by keeping the name, but instead changing Ion Maiden to Ion Fury, which is a pretty cool name nonetheless.
The holding company from Iron Maiden caught wind of the name similarities and threatened a $2 million dollar lawsuit. They even claimed that the band took the likeness of the band’s lead for Ion Maiden’s protagonist, logo, and font.
Well fortunately 3D realms were able to keep most of the game in tact, while just changing the name. They did keep the protagonist, font, and logo though as there’s no way those were stolen.
Mike Nielsen, CEO of 3D Realms had this to say,
“After careful consideration, we’ve decided to rename our first-person-shooter “Ion Maiden” to “Ion Fury.” A lot of thought went into this, but most importantly it would be a disservice to our loyal fanbase and the fantastic developers, to drag out a long lawsuit. The amazing gameplay, interactivity and pure fun, is what makes Ion Fury a great game. Not the title.”
It’s unfortunate that the game had to changed in such a way especially with a lawsuit of $2 million dollars threatening the company for everything that they worked on. In the end we should be happy that the game is actually going to be released after some time.
Ion Maiden will be available on August. 15 on PC.
Check out our report on the initial announcement of the lawsuit here.
Follow Gaming Instincts via Twitter, YouTube and Facebook for the latest gaming news.
A Nintendo Switch trailer was also released.
According to SteamDB.
An announcement trailer was also released.