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The indie horror game that fought back against Monster Energy trademark trolling (and won) is now being made into a movie

Rich Stanton

9 September 2025

That’s some real monster energy.

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(Image credit: NurPhoto via Getty)

The indie studio that took on the might of Monster Energy, and won, is having the hit game at the center of the dispute adapted into a movie. Deadline reports that Glowstick Entertainment has inked a deal for its survival horror game Dark Deception to be adapted into a feature film by indie production outfit So It Goes Entertainment.

Dark Deception is a horror game based around a Resi-style mazy hotel filled with lots of horrible monsters that has, per So It Goes, sold over six-and-a-half million copies and had 58 million players. The game was created by Glowstick CEO Vincent Livings, and will be adapted by Adrian Speckert and Cory Todd Hughes: there’s no news yet on any casting or director.
Glowstick’s Dark Deception may have plenty of monsters, but it was a spinoff that led to a public spat with Monster Energy, the ubiquitous energy drink brand owned by Coca Cola. Part of Monster’s marketing is aimed at the gamer demographic but, outside of official tie-ins like Death Stranding, this means it has been somewhat litigious within the games industry: it even took on Ubisoft over Immortals: Fenyx Rising (which was at one stage called Gods and Monsters).

Related Articles

Bloober Team’s psychological horror hit The Medium is being made into a movie by the guy who helped head up the Until Dawn film

‘There are big-ass tanky guys’: Cronos: The New Dawn devs discuss the gruelling combat and beg players to not let the enemies merge, ‘You will suffer’

‘We proved people wrong:’ After Silent Hill 2, Bloober Team’s survival horror developers are no longer ‘feeling like underdogs all the time’

Monster throws its considerable weight around whenever it catches a sniff of the word “monster” being used to describe something that, y’know, has monsters in it.

Yep, it’s another brand that thinks it owns the generic word it’s adopted. This time, however, it picked the wrong target. In early 2023 it took aim at Glowstick for the great crime of making a multiplayer game called Dark Deception: Monsters & Mortals. But CEO Vincent Livings immediately started posting about the legal threats and the absurd settlement offered by Monster, which would’ve banned the studio from ever again using the word “monster” or variations in a game name.
“It’s well known that Monster Energy is a notorious trademark troll,” said Livings at the time. “Unfortunately, they’re at it again. For a company that likes to target their drinks at gamers, they also like to try to bully and bankrupt game studios with lengthy high dollar litigation. Monster Energy’s lawyers are coming after us right now, because [Dark Deception: Monsters & Mortals] has the word ‘Monsters’ in it. They claim that our game is confusingly similar to their energy drink. Yep, that’s really their claim.”

(Image credit: Glowstick Entertainment)
Livings declared his intention to fight Monster in court rather than “roll over”, and also shared various documentation publicly in order to help anyone else facing those Coca Cola lawyers.

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Thankfully, when matters actually reached the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), it resulted in glorious victory for Glowstick, which can now make as many games as it likes with “monster” in the title: or, come to that, movies.
“Great news,” said Livings in August 2023. “We’ve officially won our trademark battle against MonsterEnergy, The USPTO board ruled in our favor today. ‘Monsters & Mortals’ belongs to us! They will never own the word ‘monster’.”

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Rich Stanton

Senior Editor

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years’ experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as “[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike.”

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Bloober Team’s psychological horror hit The Medium is being made into a movie by the guy who helped head up the Until Dawn film

‘There are big-ass tanky guys’: Cronos: The New Dawn devs discuss the gruelling combat and beg players to not let the enemies merge, ‘You will suffer’

‘We proved people wrong:’ After Silent Hill 2, Bloober Team’s survival horror developers are no longer ‘feeling like underdogs all the time’

‘No more James Sunderland’: After a successful Silent Hill 2 remake, Bloober Team is ready to move on and ‘treat ourselves’

The creators of Deadly Premonition and No More Heroes are releasing a typically over-the-top roguelite ‘fever dream’ next month

‘It didn’t exist and I wanted to play it’: Phasmophobia’s lead dev got tired of trawling around Steam for a co-op horror puzzle game so decided to just make it himself

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