Shine and Glow Reldni

A chronicle of the rise and fall of Reldni Productions, an indie game developer (among other things) that operated in the early days of the Internet.

Blurb

In the 1990s, Reldni Productions was an indie company that created entertainment like computer games, music albums, radio serials, and more.

As the new millennium rolled around, avid fans were eagerly awaiting the final installment of the Vinnie's Tomb trilogy of adventure games, arguably still their most famous creations today.

However, Reldni's website would see its final update in late 2000: The entire website was defiled by a scorned ex-employee who claimed he'd performed a hostile takeover of the company in order to see the game to its completion. Reldni Productions were never heard of again, and Vinnie's Tomb ended forever with a cliffhanger in the second game.

This semi-fictional book tells the story of Reldni Productions, the few known details about the life of its long-time president Troy Scott, and the strange occurrences that took place before the company went under. What's true and what is a part of the interwoven lore of Reldni and its creations' backstories is often impossible to discern.

About the author

Tobias V. Langhoff is Reldni's last fan, a cyber detective who has dedicated himself to exhume the last traces of this once vast entertainment empire, now long forgotten by the denizens of the Internet.

He founded the Reldni Productions Restoration Project and the Reldni wiki in 2015 to catalogue and archive the history of Reldni Productions. He is also a hobby game developer himself, and has created several homages to Reldni's games.

About the project

The idea of collecting this history in a cohesive narrative has simmered for some time, but it was brought to fruition by the Lost Histories jam. It's inspired by books on video games and the game industry, such as those by Boss Fight Books. Unlike other books of its genre, however, it incorporates Reldni's own accounts of its history into the narrative and considers it as fact from a primary source. It is as such not a work of nonfiction, but semi-/meta-fictional.