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. Not long after the shutdown, a revival project was started to fix bugs, rewrite, and complete unfinished portions of the game. This project was organized as a propriatary freemium project with little way to audit and contribute. This project also requires users to own a copy of the original game, which either impossible or very expensive (through black market key dealers) to get ahold of. OpenHellion realises 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 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 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 modify as 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. This project is not a “patch” of Hellion, and does not depend on Hellion’s existing servers.