Sega Goes Crazy, Sues Fox, EA Over Taxi

Thanks to Reuters for the news that Sega has sued Fox, EA, and developers Radical Entertainment over the similarity between EA's The Simpsons Road Rage and Sega's own Crazy Taxi. The story reveals: "Sega holds a U.S. patent, known as the '138 patent, on 'Crazy Taxi,' in which players take the role of a taxi driver who has to accomplish outrageous driving stunts to pick up passengers and quickly deliver them to their destinations." The patent infringement suit, which asks for the recall of the game and damages for lost profits, claims The Simpsons Road Rage was designed to "deliberately copy and imitate", citing a review "...that characterized 'Road Rage' as a 'shameless incident of design burglary'."

Comments

Re:Grand Theft Auto

[Babbster]

Indeed. In fact, if Simpsons Road Rage is a ripoff of anything, its gameplay is a blatant ripoff of GTA3.

Actually, you're thinking of Simpsons Hit&Run which is the GTA3/VC ripoff. Simpsons Road Rage was indeed pure Crazy Taxi action.

Patent 6,200,138

[pkaminsk]

I'm guessing that Sega is referring to patent 6,200,138. From a quick scan, the patent seems to claim 1) an algorithm to get pedestrians to leap out of the way of the player's car and 2) a directional arrow pointing to the player's destination. (There's also some mumbo-jumbo about "easy to understand" displays and "real driving feeling" -- make of it what you will.) I'll leave it to patent agents expert in the field (do such beasts exist?) to determine whether the patent is valid and whether it's been infringed.

Re:Software Patents?

[dtfinch]

Tell that to the United States Patent Office, which grants roughly a dozen software patents a daily basis nowadays. Just check out uspto.gov. It sickens me to think that I could be sued into bankruptcy for failing to examine every one of them to ensure that I don't write something similar based on my own ideas.

Software patents are quite legal. They manage it by calling them computer implemented business methods. Courts have ruled in favor of them, congress hasn't changed the law to prohibit them, and the patent office just does their job.

There's a previous art

[maxgilead]

This patent most probably is bogus (as most of them do). There's been years ago (early '90?) a game for DOS in which you played a driver of a flying taxi which had to deliver customers to their chosen destination points ASAP. And there was jumping and bouncing all the time ;-) One surely could call this taxi driver as 'crazy'. Of course game was 2D in 320x200 resolution :-)

Re:There's a previous art

[maxgilead]

No. Quarantine true, was another DOS taxi game but I'm talking about really old title, 2D only with sidescrolling board... Ugh! This game was called 'Ugh!' :-)

Here's link to its review: http://www.dosgamesarchive.com/download/game/87

Great game!

Re:There's a previous art

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless...Quarantine is also previous art. Especially since Quarantine was a 3D game like crazy taxi.

prior art

[Anonymous Coward]

and old dos game "quarantine" should do it.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/computer/doswin/review/R 47 033.html

review from gamefaqs.

Re:prior art

[ThenAgain]

The link seems to be broken so here's another one. I haven't found one with a decent screenshot.

I remember this game. It was about running all over a post-apocolyptic city, picking up and dropping off fares with a time limit, mowing down other pedestrians, jumping the taxi over things, and purchasing weapons.

Re:patenting a plot?

[Babbster]

They're not claiming to have patented a plot (a good thing since "plot" and "Crazy Taxi" aren't really appropriate for use in the same sentence). Sega is claiming that they patented specific game mechanics used in Simpsons Road Rage. From what little I understand of the patent, those mechanics at least include characters diving away from oncoming vehicles instead of going "splat" and a big floating arrow pointing the player toward a destination.

I obviously can't comment on the validity of their claim, but I can say that Road Rage was intended from the ground up to be a ripoff of Crazy Taxi. I suspect that if Sega can demonstrate damages - specifically that Road Rage took sales away from Crazy Taxi and its sequels - they can probably win their case...of course, there's every possibility that EA, et. al. will settle out of court with Sega since a) they have incredibly deep pockets and b) I don't know that anyone in the video game industry, including Sega, would benefit from this kind of precedent.

Previous Lawsuit

[Sangloth]

Anybody remember Fighter's History?
I've never played either Crazy Taxi or Simpson's Road Rage, but Fighter's History was practically a palette shift of Street Fighter 2. Capcom took DataEast to court, and lost. The judge felt that while there were definitaly similarities, Fighter's History was a different game of the same genre.

Uncanny Simularities"

Quick Summation Half way down

I'm surprised, I remember the entire thing so vividly, but I just can't find more resources about it on the web....

Sangloth
I'd appreciate any comment with a logical basis...it doesn't even have to agree with me.

Precedent

[ronfar]

There already is a legal precedent for this in the video game industry, I refer you to the case of K. C. Munchkin a Pacman type game that came out for the Magnavox Odyssey.

Scroll down this page for details:

Odyssey II page

From this, I'd say that Sega may have a case, provided they really can demonstrate that there is no prior art.

However, I'm hoping they don't get the game removed from shelves. That's what happened with K. C. Munchkin fortunately after I had already purchased it.