Over the weekend a torrent of a new game was uploaded to The Pirate Bay and to the delight of observers was greeted with a positive attitude from its creators. One of the guys behind 2D game Anodyne cheerfully posted free codes to his creation and as a result received upvotes on Reddit and votes for inclusion on Steam. As the news spreads today, nobody seems to have noticed something very unusual. The torrent has mysteriously disappeared.....

Over the years there has been plenty of negative reaction from content creators when they find their product indexed by The Pirate Bay. The threatening letters sent to the site are well known and were given a fresh airing in the release last week of the documentary TPB AFK.

Do to their ubiquitous nature the negative attitudes shown by many rightsholders barely make headlines anymore, so these days the publicity tends to go to those who see things slightly differently. And, it seems, the gaming community appears to be more open than most in that respect.

Last October the creator of Hotline Miami chose to give customer service to Pirate Bay users and this past weekend another indie dev has pleased potential buyers with another positive reaction.

Anodyne is a top down RPG/adventure game for PC, Mac and Linux and a couple of days ago found itself uploaded to The Pirate Bay. After a single “thanks” post in the torrent’s comment section, an unlikely visitor posted his opinion.

“Hi, I’m one of the two guys who made Anodyne,” a Pirate Bay user called Seagaia wrote.

Seagaia is Sean Hogan, half of the two man team behind the game, whose Pirate Bay username is mirrored on his Twitter account.

“It’s neat that Anodyne’s here and I’m glad that means more people can play it, though of course we’d love it if you bought the game,” he added.

Hogan then explained that they were trying to get the game accepted on Steam so if users could give it an upvote there they would be really grateful.

Adding to the fun, Hogan posted up some codes so people could download the game for free from Desura, which was well received in a Reddit discussion on the topic some hours later, which Hogan joined almost immediately.

“Yeah, piracy is inevitable so it’s better to embrace it – plus, it gives lots of people who couldn’t normally afford the game the opportunity to play it – and I think when you’re a small group of developers (only my friend Jon and I made Anodyne), it’s better to have lots of people able to experience your game,” he wrote.

Computer and Video Games picked up the story a little while ago and no doubt others will too, so there’s some much-needed good publicity right there. All-in-all a positive experience for the guys and fans of their games, then? Well yes, probably, except for one curious thing that no-one appears to have noticed.

The Pirate Bay is well-known for not removing torrents to any content, unless it’s criminally illegal in Sweden or contains malware or a virus. So with this in mind, try searching for Anodyne on the site. Actually, save yourself some time and don’t bother. The torrent, which was uploaded by a user called Frewyrn, has been deleted.

However, it is available via other indexes (and Google’s cache of The Pirate Bay page) and appears to be an Adobe Air installer. There is no indication of virus or malware and the torrent has plenty of seeders.

As far as we know The Pirate Bay haven’t started responding to takedowns so our money is on a delete by the uploader or perhaps an over-zealous moderator. Or maybe 2D top-down Zelda-like games have been outlawed in Sweden recently…..