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 an ineffective development process the game was shut down 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 join if they wish.

We have a roadmap for some of the features we wish to implement, and our GitHub is open for anyone to audit 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, but if any of the rightholders feel their rights have been infringed, they have a right to have their work removed from the repositories. If you are the current rightholder; please contact me on Discord (makkkkus).

How does OpenHellion differ from other projects?

OpenHellion is different in that this project is a full reconstruction of the original game, based upon a decompiled version of the latest Hellion build, that can be downloaded and played without the need to own the game on Steam. This is a significant benefit as the original game is almost impossible to get access to.

Other benefits are:

  1. We can take advantage of newer technology, for example by using more recent releases of Unity and Wwise, improving performance and ease.
  2. It’s much easier to mod. Major changes are easier to implement.
  3. The project is open-source, and can therefore be forked, edited and audited by anyone.