The rest of you, ignore this

This is a message  to 'The Fan'. I know you're reading this blog. Please contact me. We have shared interests and I need your expertise on a piece of history connected to Violette Summer. We should talk, and soon.

Velvet Overground

In amongst all the hubbub, someone nudged me yesterday to remind me the PR guys had released some more screenshots from the Velvet Assassin game-in-development. Here they are, looking lovely. Clicky for bigger. I can't say much more about them at this stage, but details will follow. Just keep reading the blog.

All images copyright 2008 Replay Studios but you know that.

More details...

The break-in seems to have been professional work, and it looks like the only thing they stole, apart from the CCTV tape, was the Violette Summer items. A few PCs got smashed up but nothing else was actually taken. We’re in the process of putting together an inventory of the missing items. If you’re a collector, or you have any interest in Violette Summer and you hear or see anything about any of these items coming onto the market, please let us know immediately.

This is a really sad day. We had borrowed the items from a private collector, and they’d only been in the studio for a few days. In other words we hadn’t have time to do the 3D scans we needed to put them in the game. Okay, I’m a Violette history buff and I was really excited to be able to actually touch these items. And I have to wonder if the thief or their client knew the items were here because I’d mentioned them on this blog.

We’re picking ourselves up and dusting ourselves off. Nobody got hurt. Just history.

Update...

We haven’t got a full list of what was taken during the break-in, but it looks like the thieves have taken all the historical items relating to Violette Summer.

Office break in!

We’ve been burglarised. Someone broke into the Replay offices last night

We’re not the easiest office to break into. We’re on the top floor of an office block in Hamburg. We're still trying to work out how they got in.

Stuff’s definitely been taken. We’re trying to work out if they were after anything specific, like the source-code for the latest build of Velvet Assassin, or if it was a crime of opportunity. The police are here and they say it looks like it was a pretty professional job.

More news as it happens.

Could it be true?

Still working to get permission to post photos of Violette’s possessions.

Meanwhile, there’s the theory of Violette’s last cache. This gets lots of people very excited. The idea is that before she disappeared she buried something in France, probably around Normandy where we believe she was operating. Nobody knows what was in it, but people say gold, or important papers, or blueprints. And there’s also speculation that the uncrackable last message points the way to it.

A lot of people have spent a lot of time looking for Violette’s last cache. It’s like Rennes-le-Château or Oak Island: there’s probably nothing there, it’s fun to think about it, and a few people who think about it too much become obsessed, spend years and fortunes trying to crack the secret, and fail.

I’m mentioning it because another group has sprung up to talk about it, headed by a mysterious individual called ‘The Fan’ who runs a blog and discussion board called Violette’s Dream. You can find it here. I’m not sure what their angle is, but they’re getting quite excited about it all.

Will Violette’s cache feature in Velvet Assassin? That would be telling...

Busy times

Sorry for the delay in updating the blog. I’m trying to getting permission to post images of some of the Violette Summers items we have in the office. But we need to contact the owner first and it’s taking a little while. More news soon.

Are you out there?

If you emailed me directly at around 16.02 CET on Monday, using the name 'the Fan', then please email me again. Your reply-to address was munged, and I would like to answer your comments.

How much do you know, and where are you getting your information?