April 1st, 2011 – Gaslamp Games, an independent game development company based out of British Columbia, Canada, has regrettably announced that its upcoming Roguelike Dungeon Crawler, “Dungeons of Dredmor”, is not an April Fools’ Day Prank. In fact, the game exists, is being actively worked on, and is still on track for a release on major digital gaming distribution services some time in April 2011. Members of the gaming press, understandably incredulous that anybody is actually trying to make a roguelike that makes money, have recently been claiming that Dredmor is an elaborate practical joke on the PC gaming community; Gaslamp’s cofounders have therefore been forced out of their bunkers and parents’ basements to inform the public that this is not the case.

“Yes,” said Nicholas Vining, Gaslamp’s technical director, “we at Gaslamp genuinely believe that you will actually want a game with 8-bit graphics, stored in antiquated file formats, where you run around a dungeon and eat Lutefisk while trying to kill an evil sorcerer. We deeply regret the error of our ways.” David Baumgart, Gaslamp’s technical art director, was heard to gnash his teeth and wail in dulcet tones at this pronouncement, before running out of the office to seal his claim to fame as the independent game community’s version of Toulouse-Lautrec. Daniel Jacobsen, Gaslamp’s technical business director, was technically unavailable for comment, being technically asleep at the time, lulled into peaceful slumber by the soothing songs of the Space Whale.

“We understand that this is a painful time,” Vining added, “and that Dungeons of Dredmor is probably the cruelest non-April Fools’ Day Joke not committed in the history of not-jokes. We apologize to our audience for not tricking them, and for actually making this thing, but we actually believed that you wanted to play a game with eighty-seven bazillion cheeses in it. I have erred grievously in mixing my business projects with my personal hobbies, and my fascination for the bovine product has doomed the company and sullened its reputation by casting it as nothing more than a band of merry pranksters. I feel that this announcement, clarifying that we have actually built this game in deathly, earnest seriousness, will go a long way towards improving our company’s reputation as being perfectly serious as well as my reputation as, technically, Gaslamp’s technical technical director.”

“Woe is the life of the starving technical art director artist,” Baumgart commented miserably and technically. “I told you we should have ripped off Minecraft.” The Dungeons of Dredmor codebase was unavailable for comment, having impaled itself on a version control system some hours earlier and remaining in critical condition.

Dungeons of Dredmor will be available for purchase in case anybody wants to buy it. The game is rated “T” for technical.