Atari Accuses Tempest 2000 Dev Of Copying Tempest 2000

Sarge034

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KDR_11k said:
Unlikely, the original game was a loooong time ago for a console so it likely contained copious amounts of low level code (C if you're lucky, most likely ASM). Since then we've developed new languages, new programming paradigms, new ways to interface with the hardware (and stuff like 3d hardware), ... A modern program looks nothing like a game looked back then (and would also be stored on completely different media) and it would be waaaaay faster to simply write a new game than to reuse anything from back then.

TxK is far too close to T2000 though, the most obvious part is that it has the exact same levels. Enemies look kinda different, mechanics may be mostly similar but aren't copyrightable, the claw ship has been used in other games by now but having the same levels is just egregious.

Rotting corpses like Atari and Interplay need to go away though.
What I was trying to get at is that I'm completely ignorant about coding, but how different could some things be? Yes there are new engines and such, but the code telling a thing to do a specific thing in a specific order can't be that different from the code giving the same orders in a previous os. And that brings about what I believe is at the heart of this matter. How similar can code be before it's infringement and can there be exceptions if there are limited ways to code something?
 

beastro

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azurine said:
Finally and most importantly: the idea that a company owns something made by an individual... imagine if the Harry potter series was owned by Bloomsbury Publishing instead of J.K.Rowling, or if the Escapist owned Zero Punctuation instead of Yahtzee. If you created something for someone else, and then they never let you make anything like it ever again...

Hmmm, did Bloomsbury Publishing hire Rowling to write up a new children's fantasy novel series? Did this site hire Yahtzee to create an acerbic weekly game review?

No, one went looking for a publisher oh her original content and Yahtzee caught the Escapists attention on Youtube and was picked up on his volition. Both could have refused and continued to create their own works, without Jeff Minter Tempest 2000 would have still been made.
 

KDR_11k

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Sarge034 said:
What I was trying to get at is that I'm completely ignorant about coding, but how different could some things be? Yes there are new engines and such, but the code telling a thing to do a specific thing in a specific order can't be that different from the code giving the same orders in a previous os. And that brings about what I believe is at the heart of this matter. How similar can code be before it's infringement and can there be exceptions if there are limited ways to code something?
The code will be very, very different simply due to the different paradigms and interfaces, whereas a game loop might be mostly variable assignments and rendering mostly memory poking in the old days nowadays it mostly delegates calls to other objects and wrestles with the OpenGL state engine.

The limited ways to code something are more of a software patent matter, we hate those effing things. For copyright it won't be that relevant since copy and paste is usually more blatant than just implementing the same algorithms, there are many non-functional parts to programming like how you split your code into objects and functions, how you name things, how you comment stuff, etc. Two implementations of the same thing will still have some minor differences, cases like the common GPL infringement are identical past a functional level.
 

Deacon Cole

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To those interested, the original 1981 Tempest is playable here. [http://my.ign.com/atari/tempest]

It's not perfect because the original arcade game used a spinner, not a mouse. That said, it's a more playable version than I would have thought.
 

Scow2

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fix-the-spade said:
Sarge034 said:
Looks alike to me. Be interested to know if any snippets of code he made for Atari ended up in this game.
If he wrote both, chances are lines from both will be similar or the same even if he started the second from scratch.

Unless he took stuff home or lifted code entirely from the old product (like say, Silicon Knights did with Unreal Engine 3) trying to claim ownership of his code because it's like code he wrote in the past is like trying to claim every painting an artist ever creates because they use the same brush strokes as one they made for you a decade ago.

In logical terms it's bollocks, but since copyright law frequently ignores logic I hope the internet sways Atari's opinion, like it did with King during the whole Banner Saga episode.
More like music licencing... and precedent comes down on the side of the artist. You cannot plagiarize yourself.