Eternal Darkness Trademark Reapplication Filed By Nintendo

It’s been over a decade since Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem was first released on the Gamecube. Since then, Nintendo of America has reapplied to maintain the Eternal Darkness trademark over the years, once in 2010 and also earlier this year in March. Now there’s been yet another reapplication for the trademark, this time adding these identification terms: “downloadable electronic game programs,” and “downloadable electronic game software.”

What does this mean for the title? Well, there are plenty of possibilities, including adding Eternal Darkness to the Wii U’s Virtual Console. They could also be remaking the game entirely and providing multiple options to acquire it, including as a download. It could be just as a preventative measure against the efforts of director Dennis Dyack to profit off of a spiritual successor to the franchise. Hopefully we’ll get further clarification soon.

Eternal Darkness played an interesting take on the survivor horror genre by introducing “insanity effects.” This was a result of being frightened by the monsters the playable characters encountered, resulting in a plethora of scary sights. Some of them were mild, like blood dripping down the walls but others were absolutely 4th wall breaking, including the appearance of losing all of your save files when you tried to save. It was a brilliant, unique idea that was just one of many reasons why the game acquired a cult following, and to make it more available to gamers today would just be a cherry on the top.

Thanks for NeoGAF user Rösti for noticing this trademark application.