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The Courts Government News Entertainment Games

The History of Videogame Lawsuits 116

Posted by Zonk from the litigious-industry dept.
AsiNisiMasa writes "1UP is running an interesting piece detailing the history of lawsuits in the gaming industry. It reveals a bit about Nintendo's old strong-arm tactics, the origin of the third party developer, Electronic Art's employee abuse, and of course plenty of violent games being 'linked' to violent behavior. Jack Thompson gets an entire page to himself." From the article: "To show their appreciation, Atari took Activision to court, claiming that the company didn't have the right to develop Atari games. Atari lost, and more companies decided to follow in Activision's footsteps, creating the concept of third-party developers. It was a defining moment for video games."
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The History of Videogame Lawsuits More

The History of Videogame Lawsuits

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  • Here's an idea (Score:5, Funny)

    by martinultima ( 832468 ) <martinultima@gmail.com> on Sunday December 18, 2005 @07:50PM (#14287774) Homepage Journal
    Let's capitalize on all these video game lawsuits and design an entirely new game based on them: You're playing as one of the major game companies, and you have to do as many sneaky under-handed things as you possibly can before the sharks – er, lawyers representing players, EA employees, and concerned parents – catch up with you!

  • Isn't that what he wants? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by User 956 ( 568564 ) on Sunday December 18, 2005 @08:11PM (#14287884) Homepage
    Jack Thompson gets an entire page to himself.

    That's good. Just what the guy needs. More notoriety and attention.

  • Atari also won against Sega (Score:5, Informative)

    by smaffei ( 565629 ) on Sunday December 18, 2005 @08:12PM (#14287894)
    Atari won a lawsuit against Sega in the mid-90s. I think it had to do with the fact that Atari had a copyright on certain types of scrolling backgrounds in games. Sega used a lot of scrolling backgrounds in their late 80s / early 90s games.

    The Tramiels used the 90+ million dollars they won to keep Atari afloat until '96.

    • Re:Atari also won against Sega (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18, 2005 @09:56PM (#14288342)
      There's a very interesting lawsuit in the article:
      Not long after Donkey Kong became a huge success in American arcades, MCA Universal sued Nintendo on the grounds that the barrel-chucking gorilla was a ripoff of their own hairy movie star, King Kong. [...] The game manufacturer's lawyer, Howard Lincoln [...] discovered that not only did Universal not own the rights to King Kong, they'd won a lawsuit years prior declaring that King Kong was actually public domain.
      I wonder how many toy manufacturers, burger chains, etc. have paid big marketing bucks to tie-in with the current Kong release, not realising that it's public domain? I wonder if any are cashing-in for free?

      • Re:Atari also won against Sega (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Actually, that's why all the advertizing says "Peter Jackson's King Kong" They do own that title and all inherant merchansizing $$ it comes with.

      • Re:Atari also won against Sega (Score:5, Informative)

        by iphayd ( 170761 ) on Monday December 19, 2005 @12:04AM (#14288835) Homepage Journal
        I would imagine that all of these companies know full well that while the name and idea of King Kong are public domain, the current likeness is not. Using it in their marketing campaign would be legal suicide.

        Also, these companies know full well that they must use the CGI Kong, as to use the public domain one would not attract the young people that the movie is aimed at.

    • Re:Atari also won against Sega (Score:5, Interesting)

      by The Lynxpro ( 657990 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [orpxnyl]> on Monday December 19, 2005 @02:04AM (#14289277)
      "Atari won a lawsuit against Sega in the mid-90s. I think it had to do with the fact that Atari had a copyright on certain types of scrolling backgrounds in games. Sega used a lot of scrolling backgrounds in their late 80s / early 90s games."

      Patents. Atari settled with Sega. Atari had done the same thing to Nintendo, for close to $200 million as well.

      Whether that kept Atari Corp. afloat or not, that's a point of debate amongst us Atarians. For most, the Company was ran into the ground. The Tramiels should have sold Atari Corp. back to TimeWarner back in 1991/92 when TimeWarner wanted them in order to combine Atari Corp.'s tech for the Lynx and the upcoming Jaguar with TimeWarner's recently re-acquried Atari Games Corp. (Atari Games arcade and Tengen in the homes) to re-create a unified Atari which would have been powerful enough to retake the industry. Alas, they did not sell out and the rest is a dismal history of incompetence.

  • KC Munchkin (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RobotWisdom ( 25776 ) on Sunday December 18, 2005 @08:14PM (#14287901) Homepage
    They skim over the fact that when KC Munchkin lost to PacMan, there were dozens of other copycat games that were suddenly too risky to market, which contributed to the industrywide 'cold spell'.

  • kind of interesting (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MORTAR_COMBAT! ( 589963 ) on Sunday December 18, 2005 @08:14PM (#14287903)
    as to how once nintendo beat off 3rd party developers with a stick, and now would love to see some 3rd party support, eh? eh? eh, nintendo?

    • Re:kind of interesting (Score:5, Informative)

      by oberondarksoul ( 723118 ) on Sunday December 18, 2005 @09:18PM (#14288205) Homepage
      At the time it was necessary for them to be cautious with who they allowed to develop for their platform. The 1984 computer games crash was, in part, due to the massive flow of low-quality software being pumped out primarily for the Atari 2600; at the time, even Quaker Oats were developing games. Nintendo saw that there needed to be at least some regulation when they attempted to restart the games market; whilst they were heavy handed to the extreme, it did the trick.

      Nintendo were happy to let third parties develop for the NES, just so long as they played by Nintendo's rules.

  • IP Lawsuits Suck... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by cypher35 ( 939831 ) on Sunday December 18, 2005 @09:01PM (#14288130) Homepage
    As someone who has personally been sued by a gaming company over intelectual property, i would say that gameing companies tend to be WAY overprotective of their intelectual property... http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/10/ 0347222&tid=211&tid=123 [slashdot.org] I owned and operated a website devoted to hacking and modding console games such as Soul Calibur 2 and Dead or Alive. These mods did nothing but add to the longevity of their games. It doesn't take much to muscle someone around with our court system and ridiculous digital copyright laws... Chances are if you don't have enough money to fight back (like myself, being a college student) they will get their way regardless of weather or not they have a legitimate case against you. -cypher35 [ninjazombie.net]

    • Re:IP Lawsuits Suck... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Scarletdown ( 886459 ) on Sunday December 18, 2005 @09:11PM (#14288181) Journal
      These mods did nothing but add to the longevity of their games


      Isn't longevity something the game publishers, for the most part, do not want? After all, how can they expect to sell you the same thing over again, repackaged with the eye candy changed around a bit, if you are still happily plugging away with the game's previous incarnation a half a year or more later?

    • Lesson learned: If you're running a website that has the slightest chance of pissing someone off, you better have some access to legal counsel or at least be willing to research the laws and stand your ground. Anyone can crank out a cease-and-decist notice, so if you don't have the capacity to at least respond to one, might as well just save yourself the trouble and pull the site down before the notice comes. I'm not saying I like it this way, but that is the nature of the game, in just about any country.
      • Well unfortunately, Tecmo didn't even give me the courtesy of a "cease and desist"... They completely blindsided me with a court summons.

        I suppose i should have done more homework prior, but who'd have thought they'd go after us so vigilantly when other "unofficial" modding communitys have existed for so long with various other games.

  • Atari lawsuit myth (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    David Crane was on "The Screen Savers" when Tech TV existed and mentioned that Activision settled with Atari, and paid royalties to Atari on every cartridge.

    Coleco also paid royalties on their VCS emulator / expansion module. Atari made tons of money off of the bad games since they got a royalty from everyone basically. The myth got started because the settlements were non-disclosed. Atari was the first collectors of licesenses and they didn't care how bad the games were as long as they got their cut. And A

    • Re:Atari lawsuit myth (Score:5, Informative)

      by The Lynxpro ( 657990 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [orpxnyl]> on Monday December 19, 2005 @02:17AM (#14289327)
      "Coleco also paid royalties on their VCS emulator / expansion module. Atari made tons of money off of the bad games since they got a royalty from everyone basically. The myth got started because the settlements were non-disclosed. Atari was the first collectors of licesenses and they didn't care how bad the games were as long as they got their cut. And Atari had some of the most tennacious lawyers in the business. A month wouldn't go by before some lawsuit was announced from Atari-Warner.
      What - you think Atari became as large as they did so fast because of sales of Pac Man and ET?"

      Uhm, excuse me. Atari had a 90% stake in the industry before 1982, which was before the 2600 versions of Pac-Man and E.T. debuted. Atari sued because it held a ton of intellectual property which was something they learned to do because Ralph Baer and Sanders/Philips sued all the game companies based upon the intellectual property they had from the original Odyssey system. So if you want to blame the litigation trend on anyone, dump it on the doorstep of Ralph Baer because he couldn't handle the fact that his games essentially sucked and Atari did it better. Activision paid royalties to Atari because most of the early Activision games were created when the programmers had worked at Atari and took the stuff with them when they defected and founded Activision. Why do you think tech companies like Apple today insist upon coding rights to anything an employee of theirs created during their employment at Apple even if it was on their off-hours?

      The whole debacle on E.T. was because of Warner Communications. You can read about it in the biography of Steve Ross, the chairman of Warner Communications who was the first media person to see the value of videogames and multimedia (he bought Atari back in 1976), and later spearheaded the merger of Time and Warner before dying of prostate cancer. Ross wanted to get Steven Spielberg away from Lew Wasserman of MCA/Universal. So Ross did things like befriending Steven, having Warner pay for his house and moving costs, and then instructing Atari Inc. from above (and above Atari's objections) to pay Spielberg $25 million for the videogame rights to E.T. The gamble worked because Spielberg then decided to make half his movies for Warner Bros. and the other half still for MCA/Universal based upon personal loyalty to Wasserman. However, the gamble contributed to the collapse of Atari and the game industry (because E.T. sucked due to its rushed production) which hurt Warner's stock and triggered Rupert Murdoch's hostile takeover attempt which in turn prompted Warner to jump the gun and sell Atari way too cheaply just to get its bad news from continuing to depress the Warner share value.

      Remember...before Netscape, Atari was the fastest growing company in the history of American business. In 1980, Atari wanted to build a $500 million campus to consolidate itself in a central location in Silicon Valley instead of being spread through 75 different buildings at the time. Warner rejected the Company's request.

      Had Warners administered Atari a little more independently, today, the computer and videogame industries would be dramatically different, in my humble opinion. We certainly would not be running Microsoft Windows on the majority of computers sold today, for one...

  • He also attempted to link Rockstar's Manhunt and the killing of British teen Stefan Pakeerah by his 17-year-old friend, Warren LeBlanc. The courts denied that the game was a factor, seeing as the game was owned by the victim, not the killer. Thompson later told IGN that the British Tabloids fabricated his involvement with the case.

    So was Thompson actually involved in the case or no?
    • Just going off what I know of Thompson, yes he was, but since the court case didn't go the way he wanted, he decided to pretend he was never involved.

      The man is an attention whore, but only for positive attention.
      He usually goes on the offensive when you call him on his BS though.

      A persecution complex is like paranoia, it is flexible enough that anything negative you do/say to him can be incorporated into his mental framework.

  • IF only... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Travelsonic ( 870859 ) on Sunday December 18, 2005 @09:40PM (#14288286) Journal
    Atari took Activision to court, claiming that the company didn't have the right to develop Atari games. Atari lost, and more companies decided to follow in Activision's footsteps, creating the concept of third-party developers. It was a defining moment for video games."

    If only something like this would happen to Konami, instead making their overly borad patent on the DDR game pad design less valid so that there can be some real competition in the dance simulation game genre instead of it being an unsteady (legal-wise) battle bwteeen In the Groove, Dance DanceRevolution, and Pump it Up.

    • Re:IF only... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Xserv ( 909355 ) on Monday December 19, 2005 @08:38AM (#14290135)
      As a former general manager and arcade technician of an amusement center that had several DDR machines, Pump-It-Up (PIU) and the incarnation of the DDR clone, "In The Groove" (ITG), I can tell you that the only one that held any salt with the dance simulation fans was the DDR. We had DDR from 3rd Mix all the way through DDR Extreme (8th Mix) and it was the only one that remained popular.

      The pad design on the PIU was pure garbage. The corner/center arrow layout was difficult for kids to use because the transitions across the board were quite far. Most kids abandoned it after a few honest plays. The use of the center arrow was poorly done. It appeared to the player that they only put the Center step into the song steps because it was on the board and for no other real reason. The stepping patterns were not well thought out. Moreover, the graphic engine's sync with the steppnig patterns continually lagged. Let's not even mentioned how many of the Sub amps that had to be replaced by a faulty design. Now, the latest release by Andamiro for the PIU series wasn't too bad. I got to play this piece at the most recent IAAPA convention and was mildly impressed by the visual improvements and song selection which was majorly lacking in previous versions.

      As far as In The Groove, or ITG, which is based on the Stepmania PC versions that were out there, it was pretty solid. If my memory servies me correctly, ITG ran on *BSD. It was a "kit" for a DDR cabinet. The purchase price when I bought them were $2000 which included the ROMS, the decal set, USB card reader (which was always flaky) and the flimsy instruction manual. Not a bad upgrade. This software had some pretty great songs and step patterns that the arcade players enjoyed but the release was plagued by missed deadlines of song upgrades (we were promised semi-annual availability of new songs and "song packs" that we were never able to obtain). No new songs means no new players and the players that had been following it died off exponentially. Needless to say, after one year the game pretty much flopped and we converted it back to a DDR with increased earnings.

      As far as lawsuits in this area are concerned, Konami's suit against Andamiro was a long, drawn out process that wasn't over until the market for dance simulators was dead. A game genre that was on top of the arcade gaming community was dead in 3 years.

      Xserv
  • This whole article reads like a 6th grade book report on the Steven Kent book.

    http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0761536434/qid=11 34956685/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-3046164-8793630?n =507846&s=books&v=glance [amazon.com]

    Get the book, it's a better read and a lot more detailed.

  • A gem shining with good laughs instead of Legalese (Score:4, Insightful)

    by D4C5CE ( 578304 ) on Sunday December 18, 2005 @09:58PM (#14288357)
    It is rare to see an article devoted to decades of lawsuits seriously covering this subject matter in such an enjoyable, highly readable and appropriately tongue-in-cheek way.
    Bear that bookmark in mind as one piece to submit on upcoming calls for contenders to the crown of "online journalism of the year" awards...

  • Some bad info, lots of missing info. (Score:5, Informative)

    by CJayC ( 74131 ) on Monday December 19, 2005 @12:55AM (#14289059) Homepage
    An interesting article, but seems to be missing a ton of research.

    That article completely reversed the actual story on the Nintendo vs. Blockbuster lawsuit. Nintendo won part of their case against Blockbuster for copyright infringement because Blockbuster was handing out photocopied manuals with the games. After the lawsuit, BBV could only either hand out the original manual (which were often never returned or damaged) or a short generic instruction sheet.

    The article also completely skips some of the more important lawsuits. Atari v Coleco (the mother of all emulation lawsuits), Nintendo v Prima (game maps ruled not copyright infringment), Nintendo v Color Dreams (an interesting case of clean-room reverse engineering), Sega v Accolade (another case of working around a lockout), Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft vs. Lik Sang (mod chips and flash carts), Sony vs. Bleem! (more emulation fun), and doesn't even begin to address the huge effects the DMCA had on the whole industry.

  • Rental lawsuits...? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Nintendo lost the lawsuit, however; the only thing Blockbuster could be nailed for was including original, copyrighted instruction booklets with their rented games. Blockbuster simply switched over to photocopied booklets, or handed out a card that explained the game's basic premise and controls to the player. Despite threats to rental kiosks and retailers who sold multiple copies of certain games, video game rentals were free to prosper, and still do.

    I'd like an explanation of this. How is the inclusion o
  • Reminds me of the game 'The Great Giana Sisters'. The biggest selling game that was never officially released. :)

    I seem to remember that the game was released for the C64 and the Amiga, then pulled back like a week later from the shelves since Nintendo threatend a lawsuit. If I'm not mistaked it was sold in some countries, not sure which though.

    Was a blast to play though...
  • The article needs more fact checking. I'm not a video game historian, but some errors jumped out here -

    Blockbuster wasn't sued for renting out manuals (don't libraries do that?) They were sued for photocopying the manuals and keeping the originals. Copyright violation.

    "Data East's 1984 arcade game" was not "The Way of Karate" - it was "Karate Champ."

    Obese individuals DIDN'T sue McDonalds and win - they sued Mcdonalds and lost. The author is confusing that lawsuit with the woman who was served a cup of lava;
  • The author made reference to the mythological "McDonald's Coffee" case as an example of a frivolous lawsuit. As hopefully more and more people know, the lawsuit was anything but frivolous:

    http://www.citizen.org/congress/civjus/tort/myths/ articles.cfm?ID=785 [citizen.org]

    He also incorrectly states that the plaintiffs won in their lawsuit against McDonald's for the fat content of their food. The fact is that the judge threw the case out:

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/cbbcnews/hi/world/newsid_268 8000/2688065.stm [bbc.co.uk]
  • Snuck in around lots of interesting contents are small comments reinforcing popular myths. "If smokers can sue tobacco companies (and win) because they didn't know cigarettes can cause cancer, or if obese individuals can sue McDonalds (and win) because they didn't know that Big Macs contain enormous fat content..." Big Tobacco didn't get smacked simply because their customers were ignorant. Big Tobacco got smacked down because they knew that their product was a serious carcinogen but spent decades lieing

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