The History of Videogame Lawsuits

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."

Comments

Here's an idea

[martinultima]

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!

Re:Here's an idea

[platypibri]

Ten Bucks? Sure! Unless, of course, you meant to type a comma, which takes it out of my price range.

Isn't that what he wants?

[User 956]

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

[smaffei]

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[iphayd]

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.

kind of interesting

[MORTAR_COMBAT!]

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

[oberondarksoul]

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.

Re:Shocking

[AKAImBatman]

Atari took no precautions to prevent third party games. The judge ruled that Atari didn't have a legal leg to stand on.

Nintendo took a look at the case and added a patented algorithm to their systems called the "Lockout Chip". Atari asked the patent office for the info on the lockout chip so that they could reproduce it without paying Nintendo royalties. Nintendo sued on patent infringment and won.

Nintendo was WAY more cut-throat than Atari ever was. Atari was just... bumbling.

IP Lawsuits Suck...

[cypher35]

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 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...

[Scarletdown]

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?

Some bad info, lots of missing info.

[CJayC]

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.

Re:Shocking

[The Lynxpro]

"But then Nintendo took Atari to court for creating third-party games for the NES and somehow got the opposite result. I do wish there were penalties for paying off judges in the United States."

Different Atari. The Atari that took Activision to court (mainly because Activision was made up of ex-Atari programmers whose games had mainly been coded on "Company" aka Atari time before they left). That was the unified Atari Inc. which encompassed both the arcade division and the consumer (home videogames and computers) divisions. Post-1984 Atari was split into two different companies when Warner sold out to try to stop Rupert Murdoch (who later bought Fox) from taking over Warner. The consumer division became Atari Corp., owned by Jack Tramiel (well, 75% owned by them and 25% by Warner, later known as TimeWarner), and the arcade division called Atari Games Corporation (75% owned by Namco of Japan and 25% by Warner). Atari Games Corp. owned the rights to the name "Atari" for arcades only; Atari Corp. controlled the rights to the brand for home videogames and computers. Thus when Atari Games wanted to get into the home gaming business, they named their division "Tengen" and signed up to become an NES licensee. They then reverse engineered the NES authorization chip and tried to be an independent third party developer because they claimed Nintendo shorted them authorized cartridges to the benefit of Nintendo's other favored third party developers. TimeWarner jumped back in and bought out Namco, and then proceeded to try to get Atari Games and Atari Corp. to work together (and they tried reacquiring Atari Corp. too) which led to the cross licensing of post-1984 Atari Games Corp. arcade titles which then appeared for the Atari Lynx game system. Atari Games Corp. sued Nintendo for monopolizing the home videogame industry in America (which they did) based upon the exclusive contracts regarding supplying authorized cartridges whereas Atari Corp. sued Nintendo on antitrust grounds for prohibiting the NES licensees from porting their titles to non-Nintendo game systems (such as the Atari 7800, the Sega Master System, and the NEC TurboGrafx-16). Somehow Atari Corp. lost their side of the case, and then proceeded to hit Nintendo upside their heads over patent infringement and they settled for nearly $200 million.

Funny how modern day Nintendo fanbois forget how vile Nintendo conducted its business back in the mid 80s to the early 90s...and its also helps to remember that once Nintendo was essentially forced to clean up its act, it lost its industry dominance to first Sega, and then Sony.

As for Atari, its the name of Infogrames American division. It is comprised of all of the American interests of Infogrames as well as the properties that Hasbro Interactive had acquired before selling out to Infogrames (including the brand, titles, and intellectual property of the former Atari Corp as of 1996). The Atari Games Corp. was sold off to WMS Industries in 1996/97 when TimeWarner rejected a bid by Nolan (King Pong, founder of Atari) Bushnell to take over the company. WMS spun off its videogame interests (the former Williams and Bally-Midway arcade companies and the formerly TradeWest home game company) into what is now known as Midway Games. Which is why you'll see such (post-1984) Atari specific classic arcade games such as "Gauntlet" comprised (and or updated) in Midway's Greatest Hits titles even though they weren't Midway titles back in the day...

Re:Atari lawsuit myth

[The Lynxpro]

"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...