Forcibly-Ported Indie Game to Get 'Enhanced Director's Cut' for PC

The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, an Xbox 360-only indie game that a Russian pirate "ported" over to PC as "a restoration of justice" will get an official PC release, the game's studio said this evening.

Ska Studios said a PC version of Vampire Smile had always been envisioned since the game released in 2011, but the time and money of bringing it out for that platform got in the way of other projects the indie shop was working on, such as its upcoming game Charlie Murder, due this summer.

"The reason The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile is not on PC is not because of something secret and evil," James Silva wrote. "Porting is a huge hassle, it’s not trivial, and I simply haven’t made time for it."

That said, the cracking-and-porting job done by one "Barabus" has focused attention on the game and therefore Silva's attention toward officially releasing it on PC. "Of course, we can’t condone it, but we definitely recognize that the only thing we can really do about it is the original plan: port to PC," Silva wrote.

"Nothing’s set in stone, but we got the go ahead to make a pre-announcement: we’ll be working with Microsoft to bring our stuff to PC," Silva promised.

To Kotaku, Silva said "the PC port was something I had been wanting to do for awhile," and something his studio had brought up with Microsoft on Friday, four days before the hack. "Once that news hit, we all decided it was a good opportunity to follow up with an announcement. It was a bizarre coincidence, and we're actually more flattered by the positive attention Vampire Smile's getting than anything, but I've said that already.

"The most common misconception about porting is that it's entirely a policy-based process, when the real issue for me has always been the months of dev time I'd personally have to sink into it," Silva elaborated. Once Charlie Murder launches, they'll have more time to devote to creating a proper PC version of The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile.