So here’s a crazy cloning story that goes a lot deeper than many of these stories go, all the way into what we’re calling Cloneception. You probably know Heroes Charge (Free), because the game has been advertised during the Super Bowl, with commercials popping up elsewhere on TV. Publisher uCool has even sponsored ESPN college basketball halftime shows, which just feels surreal.

Well, here’s a problem: uCool is being accused of cloning Soul Clash by Chinese publisher Lilith Games, who made the handy composite image to show the two games, with Soul Clash on top, and Heroes Charge on the bottom.

Yeah, there’s quite a bit of a resemblance there. But plenty of identical-looking games release all the time. And some of them even use very similar or identical mechanics as Lilith Games is accusing uCool of doing. But it gets crazier. Apparently, Lilith Games is releasing the game worldwide as Allstar Heroes, with the game currently available in some European countries. And they posted a video to their Facebook page, allegedly showing from a version of the game that you can get from the App Store right now, that there’s a copyright notice for Lilith Games that you can specifically trigger, showing that uCool explicitly stole Lilith Games’ code.

But this story of cloning goes even deeper.

See, Blizzard has taken legal action against Lilith Games in Taiwan for copying characters and settings from Warcraft. So, yeah, this situation is just nutty. It’s basically this Penny Arcade strip come to life. Cloneception!

What a strange world we live in.