OpenHellion was founded in autumn 2022 as an attempt to let new players play the abadoned game HELLION.

The orginal game, HELLION, was developed by the Serbian company Zero Gravity. Development on the game started in 2015, but because of high development costs and diminishing sales, development was stopped and the game was taken off distribution platforms in 2019. In spite of this, an active community composed of dedicated fans kept the game alive, and Zero Gravity kept the main server that powers the game open.

Not long after the shutdown, Hellion Rescue Project (HRP) was started to fix bugs, rewrite, and complete unfinished portions of the game. HRP was organised as a propriatary freemium project with little way to audit and contribute. They also require users to own a copy of the original game, which either impossible or very expensive to get ahold of (through black market key dealers). OpenHellion realises the potential for a completely open-source alternative to HRP with the ability for everyone to contribute and study as they wish.

We have a roadmap for some of the features we wish to implement, and our GitHub is open for anyone to audit, study and propose changes.

In December 2022, Zero Gravity Games was liquidated. This has resulted in uncertainty around the ownership of the intellectual property. This project is non-commercial and voluntary, and since a legitimate copy is almost impossible to get ahold of, we do not consider this project illegal. In the case a rightholder consider their rights infringed, they can contact us on Discord.

How does OpenHellion differ from other projects?

OpenHellion is a full reconstruction of the original game, based upon a decompiled version of the latest Hellion release that can be downloaded and played without the need to own the game on Steam. This is a significant advantage as the original game is almost impossible to gain access to if you didn’t get it before development stopped.

In addition to this, this project does not accept donations, as this project is strictly non-commercial. HRP accepts around a thousand dollars in donations every year, with small and infrequent updates. Donations will never influence our work, contributions will.

Other significant advantages are:

  1. We can take advantage of better technology, for example by using more recent releases of Unity and Wwise, improving performance and enabling new features.
  2. We are not limited by C# and Unity patches, making it significantly easier to make large changes.
  3. This project is open-source and can be forked, edited, studied and audited by anyone.
  4. You can run your own main server, as the project does not depend on Hellion’s infrastructure.