Nintendo Patents Insanity

theodp writes "Nintendo scored a patent Tuesday for a Sanity system for video game, which covers causing a game character to hallucinate - e.g., see bleeding walls and hear maniacal laughter - as its sanity decreases in response to encountering a creature or gruesome situation."

Comments

Call of Cthulhu ?

[morcego]

I wonder of the writers/copyright holders of Call of Cthulhu would say to that.

Re:Call of Cthulhu ?

[lilmouse]

Actually, "Prior Art" would only work if they already had a video game with weird effects. However, that bit about a nontrivial innovation would apply. If you play CoC, and make a video game out of it, then the idea of measuring sanity doesn't take a whole lot to come up with. "Gee, there's already this thing called 'sanity' in CoC...I'd better put that in the video game too!" In that sense, you could fight the patent.

--LWM

Re:Call of Cthulhu ?

[Chris Burke]

I still don't understand when people say these things, I played Eternal Darkness and not only was I killing too many enemies to possibly get my meter down, but even once it did get down I never had any "nasty" tricks pulled. That's the REASON I played the game, I thought it was going to be a bunch of nasty tricks put together, but it turned into a boring game.

You basically had to deliberately allow your sanity meter to go down and not recover it beyond killing enemies. Picking the green idol at the beginning makes this easier, since the green enemies do more sanity damage. You had to be careful then, though, because strong enemies would do a lot of sanity damage and you would eventually take health damage instead.

I let my sanity ride at about 0 most of the time, because I really liked the creepy sound effects, bleeding walls, skewed angles, and the occasional funny trick. But in general I agree that the idea was very underused. Mainly because very few of the sanity effects actually affected the game. Either it was something completely ignorable, like bleeding walls, or a "hallucination" that would end and warp you back one room with no harm done.

Also, putting "MUTE" on the screen wasn't the nastiest or best trick ever pulled... instead of "MISSION FAILED" it said "FISSION MAILED".

Cute. Actually the MUTE thing wasn't the best trick in ED by far, especially because it was obvious it wasn't for my TV. Some better tricks (on the player) in order of increasing freakiness:

Room full of zombies start beating the snot out of you and an authentic replica of the game's "Controller not found please check your connection" dialogue appears.

You access the save menu, and suddenly a progress meter appears saying "deleting..." as you watch your save games vanish.

And the best: You finish a mission and return to the "hub" level of the mansion, and suddenly a screen appears: "Thank you for playing Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. Continue the battle against the Ancients in Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Redemption, coming soon to the Game Cube!"! That one actually got me to shout "What the fuck!" at my screen. Then I laughed because suddenly I understood how Shenmue players felt.

In summary, Eternal Darkness was a great game, but its main gimmick was underdeveloped and somewhat dissapointing despite a few gems (that you missed, much is the pity). Oh, and patenting an Insanity Meter is fucking retarded.

Eternal Darkness?

[leafsfanatic]

Didn't they do this already with Eternal Darkness for the Gamecube? Way to patent something years after you put out the product!

Re:Eternal Darkness?

[RPI Geek]

From TFA:

Filed: December 14, 2000

Re:Eternal Darkness?

[Iriel]

However, the specifications of the patent can be easily cirumvented by altering a small number of details.

Many people on Slashdot keep forgetting (or never learned) that Nintendo patenting a sanity system in a video game doesn't mean that any sanity system is covered under this. For the patent to be granted, it has to contain enough specifications to make it unique. You cannot patent an idea. The Nintendo patent on the sanity system is simply one implementation of it. If someone wanted to to yank the old delerium system from the White Wolf tabletop systems (with their permission, of course), then they wouldn't have to worry about the patent in the least, as long as it wasn't a direct copy of Nintendo's specs on a video game sanity system.

As long as there has been 'reasonable modification' to the currently patented system registered, another company could create a game with their new 'insanity engine' and even patent that as having significant improvment on an existing patent.

Nintendo isn't trying to monopolize the horror/action horror video game industry people. They just want to protect their own specific method of inciting character insanity in the video game engine.
</finallytakingabreath>

Details

[HD Webdev]

Filed: December 14, 2000
PCT Filed: December 14, 2000
PCT NO: PCT/US00/33717
371 Date: September 3, 2002
102(e) Date: September 3, 2002
PCT PUB.NO.: WO01/62359
PCT PUB. Date: August 30, 2001

Nethack!

[Tiredoflurkin]

Rogue/ Nethack had this 20 YEARS ago, albeit in ASCII.

ROTT

[LynchMan]

Hmm. Wouldn't ROTT (Rise of the Triad) be prior art (circa 1997-1998 maybe?). I remember it having a 'shroomin' mode - where if you ate some mushrooms, it got all trippy for a minute or two...

But I guess that taking drugs is not covered by this patent:

character's sanity level that is affected by occurrences in the game such as encountering a game creature or gruesome situation

Let the pill popping games begin!