Bombergames may have granted the dreams of retro beat-em-up fans everywhere with the release of Streets of Rage Remake V5, but SEGA is clearly not as tickled. The official Bombergames site has removed all links to download the fan remake, as well as closing/purging related forums threads.

Streets of Rage Remake was conceived over 8 years ago, and finally reached its final iteration with v5. It was released on April 3rd 2011 but has since been removed from their site. There isn’t a clear reason why this is, but one of the moderators, charco, has mentioned that SEGA requested the game removed. Originally, charco simply mentioned, “There is a problem with the download at the moment.” After a little more prodding from forum-goers, he spilled the true reason:

SEGA have contacted regarding the download hosted on this site. While this issue is being resolved, please do not upload the game for others to download. Any links posted on this site will be removed. Thank you..

After that post, he mentioned the details won’t be discussed and subsequently locked the thread. The corresponding DOWNLOADS – Streets of Rage Remake v5.0 thread has been purged of all comments and download links.

Interestingly, the project leader, Bomberlink, had contacted SEGA during the project’s original inception, and it seemed everything was squared away. SEGA’s legal department must have changed their minds:

I would like to say that we did actually contact Sega last year through an e-mail message regarding the use of copyrighted material, to which they answered asking us to send a formal letter to their legal department, so that’s what we did.
We accepted the ESA policies regarding the DMCA as well, otherwise this website would not exist anymore.

Hopefully, Bombergames and SEGA come to an amicable solution, ideally in the form of the download being restored. I can’t imagine SEGA having too much of a problem with the project’s existence, seeing as they have all but abandoned the franchise. The good news is that the game is already out, so if you are an internet expert, it shouldn’t be too hard to track it down. It’s well worth the trouble.

Source: Bombergames