When someone who loves developers making new games for old consoles as much as I do has something negative to say about one of them, you know it’s bad news.
Some of you may not know about developer Kai Magazine Software. I have only written one article about them, that being about their then upcoming Genesis/Mega-Drive action RPG The Secret of Four Winds. Now it turns out they were exposed for stealing art from several artists online and some retro games and tracing it to use in their own games, including The Secret of Four Winds. They’ve also allegedly been stealing art in a less direct way by using AI-generated art in their games too.
SNES fan translator Krokodyl noticed this and showed his findings on Bluesky Social. He had managed to find several examples of traced over art in Kai Magazine Software’s games Life On Mars, Metal Dragon, The Secret of Four Winds, and their newest game currently up for pre-order: Death & Lead, shown above. Sorry if this is how you first learned about Death & Lead. (It’s how I first heard of it.)
So, if you’d like to see all the art these varmints pilfered from innocent artists and some of the best games in video game history, mosey on down to the link below at sundown.
We might as well begin with Death & Lead because it’s the newest game in Kai Magazine Software’s portfolio. (Not to mention my cowboy lingo right before the break) Krokodyl started right away by throwing some shade at YouTuber Retro Gamer Boy, who is known for making enthusiastic videos showcasing brand new games being developed for Genesis, including all of Kai Magazine’s games. Right after that, he shows off some horse sprites traced from Joe Musashi’s horse in Shinobi III and character and background sprites taken from Wild Guns.
This is why you cannot trust YouTubers and publishers in the retrogaming space. This 2025 megadrive game presented as “better than most snes game” has assets traced over existing sprites (Wild Guns and Shinobi III) and AI-generated backgrounds. Garbage game, garbage company, garbage shill youtuber.
— Krokodyl (@krokodyl.bsky.social) July 27, 2025 at 12:37 PM
To be fair to Retro Gamer Boy, he most likely did not know Kai Magazine stole any assets to use in their games. It doesn’t seem right to single him out, especially because he’s not the only YouTuber who sang Kai Magazine’s praises. Most people don’t immediately think to confirm whether or not art they see anywhere is plagiarized unless they already know the plagiarized art from top to bottom. It’s actually quite amazing Krokodyl got the sense that something was wrong and managed to turn up so many sources. Something tells me Retro Gamer Boy wouldn’t be too happy to learn he’d been used like this once he does catch wind of this news.
Now back to the art theft. A train in Death & Lead seems to have been taken from Vietnamese pixel artist Dwayne Tran.
I think I found where they lifted the locomotive from:
www.artstation.com/artwork/X12rmn
It’s not easy to tell because theirs is lower res but the shapes in the smoke are very similar as well as the details on the engine.— Krokodyl (@krokodyl.bsky.social) July 27, 2025 at 1:22 PM
If you wonder, I just googled “steam train pixel art”, it’s the 8th result…
— Krokodyl (@krokodyl.bsky.social) July 27, 2025 at 1:31 PM
Death & Lead has yet to actually release as of this writing, so all this footage only comes from a video trailer Kai Magazine Software has put out of this game. If Krokodyl already found four examples just from this, it certainly begs the question what else in this game is a stolen asset.
What also makes you wonder as much is all the other stolen art Krokodyl and others on Bluesky have actually found in Kai Magazine’s other games. Here’s a few examples from one of their most well known Genesis games, Life on Earth: Reimagined, with art from Parasite In City (An erotic horror indie game that I won’t link to), Blades of Vengeance, Metal Slug, and even an anime called Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress.
The walk animation of the main character
— Krokodyl (@krokodyl.bsky.social) July 30, 2025 at 8:22 AM
The walk animation of an enemy
— Krokodyl (@krokodyl.bsky.social) July 30, 2025 at 8:22 AM
The background of the first stage (left) is an artwork (right) from pixel joint pixeljoint.com/pixelart/747…
— Krokodyl (@krokodyl.bsky.social) July 30, 2025 at 8:23 AM
The cherry blossom tree is also from pixel joint. Although the link is dead, only google has it in cache.
— Krokodyl (@krokodyl.bsky.social) July 30, 2025 at 8:26 AM
One of the spaceship is traced over an existing artwork (www.reddit.com/r/PixelArt/c…)
— Krokodyl (@krokodyl.bsky.social) July 30, 2025 at 8:36 AM
The running animation in the intro
— Krokodyl (@krokodyl.bsky.social) July 30, 2025 at 1:25 PM
Which explains why the gun and the shoes in the cover art do not match that of the in game sprite!
— Krokodyl (@krokodyl.bsky.social) July 30, 2025 at 1:26 PM
The explosion in the intro is stolen from Metal Slug
— Krokodyl (@krokodyl.bsky.social) July 31, 2025 at 11:18 AM
Next, lets move on to their newest game, and the subject of my one other article on Kai Magazine Software, The Secret of Four Winds. I already joked in that article about the main character Al looking a lot like the star of Konami’s classic cyberpunk graphic adventure Snatcher, but it turns out the game had some of its backgrounds traced off of backgrounds from three classic Neo-Geo fighting games: The Last Blade 1 and 2 and Far East of Eden: Kabuki Klash. I sure didn’t see enough to joke about that before. The first of these examples was actually pointed out by SkeletonManners.
their newest game, Secret of the Four Winds just straight up has stolen Last Blade 1 and 2 backgrounds in it its fucked
— skeletonmanners.bsky.social (@skeletonmanners.bsky.social) July 31, 2025 at 12:29 PM
the originals
— skeletonmanners.bsky.social (@skeletonmanners.bsky.social) July 31, 2025 at 12:32 PM
The ending for Secret of the Four Winds also uses stolen assets: Last Blade – Moriya stage and Last Blade 2 – Graveyard stage.
The foreground trees are from Far East of Eden: Kabuki Klash (Hudson, 1995) and the cityscape from a random gif from at least 2017.— Krokodyl (@krokodyl.bsky.social) July 31, 2025 at 12:40 PM
That brings us to Metal Dragon, one of Kai Magazine’s earlier, and most well known, Genesis games with its own fair share of stolen art from Sega and Sunsoft’s arcade game Tough Turf, SNK’s classic Neo-Geo fighter Samurai Shodown, a modern indie metroidvania game called The Siege and the Sandfox, and a cityscape from a pixel city Android wallpaper app by Supa Powa. (It might be a good time to point out that some of this traced art is reversed in these games)
Kai Magazine did this since starting as a hobbyist on the MSX scene decades ago. Here’s another one I found. Also, on @goatistream.bsky.social stream for their latest game, chat found the ending traced backgrounds from Last Blade 1 & 2.
— IkariDC (@ikaridc.bsky.social) July 31, 2025 at 8:11 AM
Good catch! I’ve been looking for that one. I had already found where the window and lighting came from:
allan-swart.pixels.com/featured/2-s…— Krokodyl (@krokodyl.bsky.social) July 31, 2025 at 10:53 AM
In the intro, the buildings are from a phone wallpaper and the background from an indie game called “The Siege and the Sandfox”
— Krokodyl (@krokodyl.bsky.social) July 31, 2025 at 11:08 AM
The artwork is literally the banner for the Twitter account of the devs. A version of this artwork was shared as early as 2016:
forums.unrealengine.com/t/the-siege-…— Krokodyl (@krokodyl.bsky.social) July 31, 2025 at 11:14 AM
In this screenshot, the cliffs on the left are stolen from a Samurai Showdown background (stage Gairyu Isle)
— Krokodyl (@krokodyl.bsky.social) July 31, 2025 at 11:10 AM
As Krokodyl says in another post of theirs, none of these would matter to them if Kai Magazine’s games were free, downloadable games. However, Kai Magazine’s games are all sold at premium prices and printed on cartridges with boxes and manuals. In the case of Metal Dragon, it’s also available in a cartridge for the Evercade line of consoles, packed in with another Kai Magazine game: Life On Mars. Well, at least Life On Mars doesn’t have any stolen art assets, except for the fact it does.
A game selling itself for the same kind of premium price many games on modern platforms go for today carries an expectation that its development was worth that price. If the game is as loaded with stolen assets as Kai Magazine’s games are and still sold brand new for high prices, then it makes the developer look cheap and stingy. As Krokodyl says, this wouldn’t be such a big deal if these were free games, maybe from an inexperienced developer just practicing their craft before they come out with a real game brimming with inspiration and able to show the progression they’ve made. Sadly, Kai Magazine Software appears to be far less genuine than many of the greenest game developers out there.
As for Krokodyl, this is actually not their first time exposing some plagiarism going on in the retro game development scene. Back in February 2025, they had made a blog post detailing how four games re-published by Retro-Bit in recent years: Shockman Zero, Gley Lancer, Assault Suits Valken, and Majyūō: King of Demons, all had new translations that turned out to be not-so-new. They were actually copied almost word for word from fan translations of each of those games made years before and, in the case of Assault Suits Valken, the digital release of the game on modern systems like Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4. After that blog post made waves online, Retro-Bit cut ties with the translator they worked with on those four games and have since brought on a new translator. This new translator is working on Retro-Bit’s newest Collector’s Cartridge, which recently ended its pre-order campaign window: Undeadline for Genesis.
So far, Kai Magazine Software has made no known statements about the stolen art in their games. I have also tried reaching out to them myself and have received no reply. For the time being, I will not be reporting on any other new games coming from them. That won’t be so hard for me anyway, since many of their games already flew well under my radar. As I’ve said before, this is how I first heard of Death & Lead, but needless to say, I will not recommend you spend your money on someone too cheap to even hire an artist to work with them on some original art for their games. There are plenty of games from more dignified indie developers and retro publishers I will recommend you support instead.
If you had ever played a game from Kai Magazine Software, how does this discovery make you feel about your purchase now? Were you already aware that Kai Magazine Software stole a bunch of art before Krokodyl found out? Were you unfortunate enough to have already pre-ordered Death & Lead before learning all this? Tell us in the comments below.
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lmao legends
Takes one to know one, Legendary
If they go by the thievin’-ass company script, they will soon issue a statement throwing some contract artist(s) under the bus and try to make themselves out to be victims who had no idea as well, along with some boilerplate pledge to do better in the future, probably generated by ChatGPT.
Wouldn’t surprise me
Great writeup.
How did they find all this stuff out? A bunch of people simply recognizing different things that they then compiled together? It makes for an incredible list in any case.
I’m guessing that’s it, but like I say in the article, most people don’t usually look at something and think “Hey, I’ve seen that somewhere before”, or at least I don’t.
I actually saw a video of this on YouTube a month or so back, don’t know it was the same guy who highlighted this, but I wasn’t surprised to be honest, every new technology has both good and bad fortune to it with the capacity to be used positively as well as negatively, it seems this is the negative aspects of AI, and as with every industry, they all have their own brand of dodgy opportunistic thieves associated with it looking to capitalise on what they see as a marketing trend to make a business out of it.
Stumbled upon this article when searching for news or reaction from Kai Magazine. Great article and it makes me sad when developers steal work without credits. Stealing is one, but lying and claiming you did it yourself is beyond low life. I also didn’t know about retro-bit. I guessed of course they used existing rom patches but assumed that they contacted the person for approval or at least mentioned those in the credits. Instead they only credit themselves. Back in the days you would be called a lamer or worse.
And the solution is so simple(at least for using translation patches): just credit those people you stole work from, even without acquiring there approval,