Midway Sues Ericsson Over Defender 'Tribute'

An anonymous reader writes "Redkeyreddoor is relaying a story, via the Wall Street Journal, that Midway has sued Ericsson for distributing a completely unlicensed version of Defender on its T68 cellphone. The mobile game in question seems to be 'Game', which does bear a remarkable similarity to Defender (there's a screenshot at this Japanese cellphone review page). Ericsson has apparently removed 'Game' (and a version of Tetris, ingeniously called 'Tetris') from later versions of the T68."

Comments

Wow.

[Asprin]

Defender was hard enough with a joystick and five buttons spread out over a wide two-hand console. I can't imagine playing it on my cell phone with a keyboard the size of a mini-post-it note (and my big fat tree-trunk thumbs) would be even remotely entertaining.

If they were gonna steal a game, they shoulda done some research first. Something like Galaxian or Galaga would have been a better fit.

Re:Wow.

[curtisk]

you make a great point, but I have a Defender LCD "keychain" style game that plays just fine with a tiny directional pad and 4 tiny buttons, the whole game is only about 3" long by 1" wide, yeah the gameplay isn't quite the same as the arcade, but its still close enough

Re:Wow.

[DLWormwood]

Naturally, it only uses one button

I think the original poster forgot that Defender's joystick was only two-way. This reduced the number of switches needed to implement the game's interface. A more standard joystick could simply be mapped to the two-way joystick, with the off-axis substituting for the Reverse and Thrust buttons. (I personally think the 2600 joystick was more natural than the arcade's requirement of a reversal toggle.)

On what grounds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Defender was released 24 years ago. Is this a copyright case? I doubt they actually took any actual code from Defender.

Even if they did, copyright's whole purpose is to promote growth of the public domain - is anybody arguing that Williams Electronics, the creator of Defender, would not have created it if they weren't guaranteed an artificial monopoly for over two decades? Why are copyrights on computer software so ridiculously long anyway?

Anyone else roll Defender back in the day?

[qloops]

One of my proudest video game moments was rolling the score on Defender (rolled at 1,000,000 as I recall). Many a roll of quarters went into practising this game while skipping out of high-school. It was a hard game to master but definately one of the most adrenaline charged ever.

Re:Haven't they heard of Epyx Vs. Data East?

[ronfar]

Well, perhaps the case they are thinking of is K. C. Munchkin, which was a travesty of justice, paricularly considering the fact that Atari's Pac-Man game seemed like it was designed to make children cry.