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

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. Not long after the shutdown, revival project was started to fix bugs, rewrite and fix unfinished portions of the game. This project was organized as closed source with little way for volunteers to audit and contribute. OpenHellion realizes the potential for a completely open-source alternative to this project 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 impossible to access, we do not consider this project illegal. In the case a rightholder consider their rights infringed, they have a right to have their work removed from the repositories.

How does OpenHellion differ from other projects?

OpenHellion is different from other Hellion revival projects because it is a full reconstruction of the original game, based upon a decompiled version of the latest Hellion released build 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 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. Other projects accept over a thousand dollars in donations every year, with small infrequent updates. Donations will never influence our work.

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. It is much easier to mod as both minor and major changes are easier to implement.
  3. This project is open-source and can be forked, edited, studied and audited by anyone.
  4. This project is not a “patch” of Hellion, and does not depend on Hellion’s infrastucture.