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Register, Others Call Plagiarism in "Limbo of the Lost" Game
Fallen Andy writes "'The Register' has an article describing 'Limbo of the Lost' (developed by Majestic and sold in the U.S by Tri Synergy) which seems to have 'borrowed' copiously graphics assets from other games. Over at the GamesRadar forum there is a thread with some screenshots. Finally, this game has its own Wikipedia entry. Warning to all — move the soft drink away from the keyboard and monitor before you look at
those screenshots. Blatant this is, very blatant indeed."
Looks just like Oblivion...
The original creators of that stuff didn't lose anything, its all bits man.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
To add insult to injury.
It's all screenshots from Oblivion, Thief 3, Unreal Tournament series, Diablo, and other games. Limbo Of The Lost doesn't render those things in 3D but uses it as background image for the adventure game. Really lame that the developers of that game thought they were going to get away with it. I wonder what was going on there, they couldn't find a graphics artist to draw the backgrounds so they just photoshopped screenshots from other games together. Still a bit of a shame for the (if there were any) good points of the game, that are now gone down together with the whole game due to this plagiarism.
You have a game idea you've put (some) hard work into since the Atari days. You finally get it released.... And since you cheated, all people will ever remember is that you're crooks and your game is a fraud.
I feel sorry for the people who worked hard on the game and had no idea someone was doing this.
Except much shittier... Oh... and YES, I quoted myself!
I just lost the game :(
It's all fun & games until someone loses the game.
I mean... did they somehow convert/import the assets, or did someone just sit there trying intentionally to make something exact.
I do wonder if these are a few 'rare' points in the game, or a larger overall theme. Maybe some intern/rookie screwed up and copied too much when the boss said, "Make something like this"
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Three or more, it's research.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
...it is sampling, just like in the music industry.
For example, listen to the opening sequence of Queen's Under Pressure featuring David Bowie. Then, after having your stomach pumped as a precaution, the opening bits of Vanilla Ice's Ice, Ice Baby.
For the Google impaired, here is a YouTube link doing a comparison.
Just equate Limbo of the Lost with Ice, Ice Baby and you will understand. Of course, that would mean Majestic Studios is really Vanilla Ice...
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
... The scene where the protagonist is leaping over barrels thrown by a large orangutan. It's a dead giveaway.
This is the best restaurant I ever eat in
What level of idiocy is required for people to think they can somehow get away with this type of thing without anyone noticing or caring.
I simply can't comprehend the thoughts that must've gone through the developer's minds when they decided this was okay.
My first knee-jerk reaction was the same as everyone else - this is a blatant rip-off of several game's graphics. However, if as is reported this is a point and click adventure, and it is just set with screenshots from other games as the backdrops, there may not be a copyright or even plagiarism issue. Screenshots would not require the 3D data to be copied out of the source games.
After all, Resistance: Fall of Man had that scene set in Manchester Cathedral - and the Cathedral couldn't exactly claim copyright on the design! You'd get the same problem with any game set in front of/in a real place. So this is almost an about face of that concept.
So controversial - probably. Free publicity - definitely. Illegal - probably not!
Heh, that's some of the hardest work I've seen gone into plagiarism. That is, outside of academia and Hollywood and politicians where everyone pretty much copies everyone else...
They must have a lot of monkeys to end up with the same thing!
You know one room, surely could be similar with a developer having played one of those other titles and been inspired even subconsiously while building. No way in hell you could claim that as anything near original work.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
What they need to do now is spend all the money they saved on the artwork on a really good lawyer. One that can stand up in court and say "A layman might think he sees a superficial resemblance" while keeping a straight face.
What DRM it uses to keep it from being copied...
all those games clearly plagiarised from their game which has clearly been in development nearly as long as duke nukem forever,
The company may go bankrupt because of this, but the game will probably become an internet legend. Surely this'll be a collectors item, get your copy from bittorrent today!
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
The main point is that they used the material and lied, saying they'd created it themselves, that's a whole different issue from fair use.
It may be illegal anyway, since they used the images to make a product for resale without permission. If you plan to use an image from a game for commercial product you must, at the very least, cite your sources.
I have a number of game development books that rely heavily in in game shots from many current titles, and they are *all* cited correctly.
Even when you aren't selling the end product it's impolite not to do so.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
It's about an adventurer who wanders from game to game to solve the mystery of the plagiarised graphics.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
"Our hope, if everything goes well with the sales, is that within a year we will all be stopping the day jobs and doing this full time."
Epic
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
"everything was re-written from the ground up, everything apart from the initial concept and some character design ...and the rest is history."
"The project is more influenced by film and literature rather than other games, we want the experience to be as original as possible and as such we have made a calculated effort to keep away from other games in the genre."
"All of the game (apart from initial background story and some character designs) had to be re-written, all the characters had to be created in 3D and animated, all the background scenes re-created, all the sounds, coding and music?..basically everything had to be redone or newly created for the PC version. This is not an old game that has been dressed up. This is the original concept, dusted off and re-created."
Also, the game has been in production for 10 years and rewritten few times. I think these guys deserve a "Hard core audacity" award...
Full Article
But, based on my understanding of several recent different but similar situations involving movies and music, we can all safely assume that those people would not have bought the game to begin with.
We can also take comfort in knowing that the companies from whom the graphics were lifted probably keep the lion's share of the profit from game sales and the graphic artists make almost nothing, by comparison.
Also, if the guy at 'Limbo of the Lost' bought the game it is his to do with what he wishes because he didn't agree to any stupid 'don't lift graphics' clause and shrinkwrap licenses have never been proven in court anyway so no one has any legal standing to complain about anything. This includes if he wants to make a mashup of the game's graphics and his own cool gaming idea and call it 'Limbo of the Lost'.
And furthermore copyright law has been subverted by corporate interests and is just a shadow of what the found fathers wanted it to be. Copyright is OUR rights not theirs it makes sure WE get the copyrightable content but it has been changed around to give CORPORATIONS all the control. Do I want DRM on my hard drive so I can play a game but keep me from taking screenshots? No! I'll never install Vista. If this was available in WINE I would play it but it isn't. I don't even run NDISWRAPPER!
So, in conclusion, no. I don't think anyone has stolen anything. Information wants to be free.
As in I don't pay anything for it.
(P.S. -- I'm adding some skulls to this comment)
Powell: "So, what are we doing?" Cheney: "Oh, crime." Powell: "Crime? Good, OK... crime..."
...it's OK to pirate this one then??
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Oblivion? D-Eye-Ah-Blo? Man, how the hell did anyone remember these incredibly obscure games?
I'm not going to buy it, but I have a weak point for unintentional comedy.
God spoke to me.
subject say it all.
space invaders and galaga are two completely different games, but you have point there.
if nothing else, this game really got some serious publicity with this stunt. if it comes through, and if the game is actually good, they will make much more profit than they'll lose in court. (especially if the original content is worth the stunt)
I shit care whether graphics are copied, if the stuff is quality work. and I believe many ppl think like this.
whatever, can't say anything else, no matter whether this particular game is unique or not, copyrights suck!
Shakespeare did not invent the plots of his plays. Sometimes he used old stories (Hamlet, Pericles).
So, in which older tellings of something like Hamlet can you point to prose such as Shakespeare's "To be, or not to be..." passage? It's one thing to write a game with a magic ring quest plot, and it's quite another to say you're doing something original, and it's just a coincidence that you have characters named Frodo and Gandalf.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I don't see anything morally wrong with this. Next up, news that Broken Sword is a Diablo clone. So what. //for later reference
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
The register really cant have too much room to talk... one day i was reading up about a particular subject, and four of the articles a google search found were exactly the same article with four bylines. granted, the register's was later updated with a few grammar corrections, and a single story probably isn't as big a deal as borrowing from another video game.
Not that I approve. Some people can write code, design game concepts etc but be incapable of drawing pictures. When I look at the photo of the 3 main developers I don't see a picture that looks like three guys that would play typical cutting edge games. They come up with game logic that kinda works but is butt ugly. They hire someone who claims they are a shit hot CG artist, complete with examples of "their" work. This person then proceeds to rip other peoples' work.
The developers are of course stoked by the amazing art "developed" for their game, and give lots of bonuses. Then they discover that they've been sounded robbed, as their game (and their reputations) are soundly denounced.
I'm not saying this has happened in this case, but I've seen scenarios like this before (when I did work in the games industry).
I'm also not saying that this justifies it. If anything it reveals "technology blindness" where the developers are so in love with their own product that they don't bother looking at what else is on the market.
"Between the three of us we researched, wrote, designed, animated, scripted and developed the whole game from home."
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
the pot, however, doesnt know where that nasty rumor that the kettle is black got started...
This link needs to be added to the original post. It's just priceless given the current revelation.
Myst's programmers designed a 3D world themselves and pre-rendered it using the ray tracers they could find. They then loaded those shots onto a CD-ROM or two.
If real-time 3D renderers were even available back then, they were downright crude in comparison. In fact, I seem to remember Myst looking cleaner and more spectacular than the screenshots from "Limbo of the Lost".
Shakespeare merely looked at history (which, arguably, has some of the best stories) and at other popular works and mimicked those works and plots.
Plagiarism, on the other hand, in my opinion, is an exact replica of someone's work without giving that person or people any credit for that work. So, just to illustrate my point...
Me writing a novel about a guy who has special, and even superhuman abilities, and who uses those abilities to take down an evil regime after being trained by his master is not necessarily plagiarism. That's just a simple "good vs. evil"-type story.
Me writing,
"Do, or do not, there is no try."
or
"Luke raced through the trench towards the exhaust pipe with Vadar close on his tail."
Think about it, the only time that somebody works that hard to create something that is EXACTLY like what they're copying is when they're intentionally attempting to counterfeit the original. This isn't just "plagarism"; this is reuse of editorial files.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
http://209.85.141.104/search?q=cache:GTYHJgCqVCYJ:www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl%3Faction%3Dviewthread%26threadid%3D88482+%22Limbo+of+the+Lost%22+engine&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us I'm still wondering how they were able to import all those assets and levels so flawlessly into their own engine?
That must have been a tremendous job just to write the different converters but then again I don't understand why Steve Bovis, was not able to code a simple CD check into the main menu??? ...this was the follow-up to that question: They didn't.
"Wintermute Engine Development Kit is a set of tools for creating and running graphical âoepoint&clickâ adventure games, both traditional 2D ones and modern 2.5D games (3D characters on 2D backgrounds). The kit includes the runtime interpreter (Wintermute Engine, or WME) and GUI editors for managing and creating the game content (WME tools) as well as the documentation, demonstrational data and prefabricated templates." - http://dead-code.org/home/
All the backgrounds they stole are screenshots from other games. They made a 3D character to move (with scaling) on 2D backgrounds.
Contest to create "screenshots" from Limbo of the Lost: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?page_id=1909
Contest is over, but the entries are hilarious.
Ideas and stories are not copyrightable. It's the execution of the ideas and stories that are protected.
You can take the basic story of "King Lear" and create "Ran". You can take the basic story of "Seven Samurai" and create "The Magnificent Seven". Those pairs of movies share plots and stories but each executes its own vision.
In this case, the problem with the game is that they stole the execution - i.e. the art - used in other games, not the story.
"Even for Slashdot, that was a very obscure reference!" - Anonymous Coward
The thing I like the most about the article is that the it specifically states the NAMES of the morons that thought they could get away with this.
All to often, articles simply list the name of the company in question, and the people actually behind the theft(I consider it theft) hide behind that, thus circumventing any real lasting public derision.
The article destroyed any credibility these idiots may have had in the gaming marketplace, and rightfully so. A simple Google search by potential employers/investors will be all it takes to bring up that article.
Back to McDonald's with you, fryboy!
These are static screenshots? Pathetic. I say lobotomize 'em all and hand them over to the creators of the original images as body slaves.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
This isn't stealing the general concepts of another and creating an original body of work. This is taking something that someone else created and selling it.
Not sure why people are in such a tizzy over this.
Really? You can't see the difference between basing a play on a well-known story and lifting other people's artwork for your game?
Your examples don't even have anything to do with plagiarism: there may be plenty of accusations against Shakespeare in that regard (Marlowe's name is usually attached), but I doubt he'd ever claimed to have invented Pericles or Julius Caesar, for example.
sic transit gloria mundi
Think of this more like someone took a picture of the screen when you were playing Space Invaders, then used that image as a background for their RTS space domination game.
I think this case could really present itself to be a very interesting legal president. It sure looks like it could fall under fair use and derivative work. The game is vastly different than all of the games that the artwork was taken from. Which would move it into the derivative work direction. Then the question would seem to be, does Bethesda's copyrights extend beyond the actual content of the game and into images taken of the game? If it does, it would imply that distributing screen shots and FRAPS videos with out the game copyright holder's permission would be a violation as well.
And even if that is the finding, they could still argue fair use. If 2 Live Crew can sell a single of Pretty Woman, if Vanila Ice can go platinum while taking a note for note copy of Queen, well, why can't this company use modified screen shots of existing work to develop an entirely new game?
Not sure I entirely like the thought, but I'm not entirely sure I like the alternative either.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
The difference is that in this case, it's essentially the opposite: same sprites, different gameplay.
Unfortunately (for Majestic), the sprites (and not the gameplay) are the copyrighted bits!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
man, all those games got prime product placement in a new game, and haven't paid for it? Damn right the studios need to pull this game until those old games pay Tri Synergy for the right to have that product placement in their new game.
seriously, I wonder how much they would have had to pay for the rights to these scenes? Obviously it made at least 2 reporters dust off their old games, and put a few games back in the highlight for another 5 minutes (this time for free.)
This was too well handled for a budget marketing dept to have pulled off, otherwise I'd be reaching for the tinfoil hat.
I just lost the game
There's a difference between being inspired by other works and ripping off pieces of them verbatim.
If Shakespeare took Homer, did a quick translation and presented it as his own work he'd have been regarded as a plagiarizing hack. All the games these guys copied share lots of similarities, but this is the only one that copies verbatim.
You seem to be implying that those who justify their music and software piracy but condemn this company are hypocrites. But even your straw-hat parody of that viewpoint would not be hypocritical in condemning the folks behind Limbo of the Lost. The reason: it was made by a corporation, and the piracy was used to make that corporation money. Thence the puppet considers vilification for anything (including copyright violation) to be quite justifiable! That said, nobody I know holds the bizarre grab-bag of views you present here anyway, not the two-recompensed-profits-make-a-recompensed-profit argument in paragraph 2, not the conflation of copyright and EULA in paragraph 3, and certainly not the increasingly incoherent and self-contradictory rant at the end. Your attempt to hoist the Slashdot groupthink zeitgeist on its own petard have failed. Go home and eat a sandwich.
(rot13) rpbzbab@tznvy.pbz
I wonder how many of those games they took screen shots from were purchased versus borrowed.
If they purchased them they opened themselves up to heap a trouble.
If they "borrowed" then they opened themselves up to a heap of trouble.
Really amazing, how did it ever get to distribution? Do the people who run these companies not play games themselves?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Bonus points for referencing a plot that Kurosawa borrowed and a plot that was borrowed from Kurosawa.
No, but the Star Trek movie title that comes 23 lines later in that soliloquy was ripped off from Marlowe.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Some decent parody screenshots in the vein of Phriday can be found at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?page_id=1909
My favorite is the Zork one.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/june08/limbocompo/JohnLeonard.jpg
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
13th Floor and The Matrix?
Tombstone and Wyatt Earp?
The list goes on and on, but Hollywood does this all the time and no one calls them out on "plagiarism".
I'm not saying they could have done better, but making something suspiciously similar but different enough to avoid copyright and trademark violations is not a big deal.
Its funny if nothing else... Like the Wilhelm scream which I actually heard in the latest Indiana Jones movie. That's more of an ongoing joke than plagiarism though.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Can't see the screenshots.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Bad example, that isn't sampling, that song was a collaboration between Queen and Bowie, and Mercury and Bowie sing all the way through.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Pressure, and go and listen to it again!
...For _development_ phases in the entertainment industry. For example, the movie industry will do mock-ups of productions using preexisting movie musical scores that match the intended mood of the scene. This is shown to other members of production to get a feel for the intended end result. Since there is no profit potential for this, it falls under fair-use. Original music scores are commissioned and mixed into the final production before it reaches commercial audiences.
It very well could be that these designers were using the same technique for their backgrounds. Especially as an independent production organization, it is a much easier sell to show a demo with borrowed backgrounds and explain that they need to be developed than to have your hero walking around a white background with a sign that says "@TODO bkgnd". It is pure speculation, but perhaps these designers merely did not make it sufficiently clear that they were mock-ups, and not intended for the end product? I guess we'll learn more as the story develops.
Oh don't worry they thought of that.... by stealing an existing companies name to use!!! The real Majestic Studios is a photography firm based in the Hudson Valley - you can read about them here: http://www.majesticstudios.info/about.html
Still gotta to hand it to these muppets. And on the same day that the BBC publishes a news article about the UK's games industry under the title Skills shortage hits games firms .
Well folks - the UK games industry is still doing fine, e.g. Statix and the rest of the talented folks @ Media Molecule!
The Wilhelm scream is public domain. Can't be plagiarism any more than putting a clipart birthday cake in an email is.
it's just a coincidence that you have characters named Frodo and Gandalf.
Actually it is just a coincidence that I have have characters named Frodo and Gandalf.
My game takes place on a gay porn film set.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I looked at the pictures so far and I noticed that they are not identical.
But it is clear that someone was essentially tracing them/had the pictures next to them when they drew in the textures. Kind of like if you had a picture of an Escher drawing and tried to exactly duplicate it on the computer - just with your own mediocre skills(why the originals look better)
So *technically* not copying. But it's clearly lifting the other guys' materials and re-using their hard work to cut corners. My guess is that the artists were on an impossible schedule and started looking around for source material to use as "inspiration". Of course their bosses were clueless. They probably haven't ever played a computer game.
Watch for a "we've fired the artists and are re-doing the parts in question" type statement shortly.
I mean, it's not as if any gamers would know such obscure titles as Diablo II or Oblivion or Unreal Tournament or anything...
I can just hear the designers now...
"We'd have gotten away with it, too... if it weren't for those darn kids!"
"One's own breath."
First, it's something like 3 years of development -- maybe they've had the idea since the Atari days, but they only claim 3 years.
Second, it was 3 guys. That means that at a minimum, 33% of the dev team knew what was going on, and the other 67% were clueless at best. But seriously, I work in a team with 3 guys, and just being in the office, I overhear more than enough to have a solid idea of what's going on.
Third, "worked hard"? They didn't even write the engine. It's roughly equivalent to RPGMaker, as I understand it -- and I'll remind you, the "hard work" of building an RPGMaker games is artwork, story, and setting stats on various characters and enemies.
Given that the reviews don't rate the story or the gameplay very high, this means that the "hard work" is really just putting together the screenshots.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
...is call it a parody and its all legal! Brilliant!
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
I'm quite excited about the chance to play a synthesis of some of the best games of all time. Or at least a synthesis of their screenshots that will bring up a really odd series of memories. If they had included Okami/Rez/Psychonauts assets I'd even consider buying it.
They should call it a parody and move on.
I get it now. The characters can't decide which game they're supposed to be in.
Great artists steal. Forget how much credit the games credited creators deserve, forget if it counts as plagiarism...
All I want to know is, is it a good game? If so, I applaud them.
Property is theft.
Yeah, that's just it. These guys are not taking Unreal Tournament, Diablo, et. al. and passing it off as their own, they are taking some of the visual game elements and incorporating them into a new game.
They are kind of dishonest about where the visual elements came from, and no one likes a shady dealer.
It's clear the modelling they took from other games took time to produce and has value in the marketplace, and I am not saying it's fair or anything. I just don't get why people are so vexed by the idea of plagarism, this is something that has been coming for a long time.
M
As an artist I think I'd rather someone make money off of my work than take credit for it.
Reporters are so lazy these days it's SOP to just put their byline on a press release and call it a story.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
What's in a game? In THIS game in particular, apparently there isn't even really a graphics engine. They're just putting up background art. There's a bit of a story, probably, and some programming.
The art is a big part of any game, and likely a bigger part of this one. If they'd copied the mood of Doom 3, or thrown in a few elements that reminded you of a particular game then fine, but pixel for pixel copies aren't cool.
Shakespeare wasn't a plagiarist, even if he did use some story lines as inspiration from other authors, so long as he didn't make word for word, verbatim copies. These guys did.
Sometimes plagiarism is a fine line, but this isn't one of those cases.
Can anyone else not see that this is a prank? The facts of the matter: three boozey 40-somethings think lets use an create-your-own-game editor to make something out of screenshots of top well known games. I therefore don't believe they believed for even a second they could get away for this. They wouldn't deserve the title con-men if this is the case. It's implausible they thought they could get the money and run to brazil before anyone play-tested this. Why else but a bit of a gag?
This is such a massive act of blatant plagiarism it must be a big joke or I will vanish in a puff of cognitive dissonance.
The title is incomprehensible.
I can only guess that you meant that the Register and others made these accusations.
They didn't just use 2-D screenshots of 3-D scenes as backgrounds. They also copied graphical "assets" directly and also stole film footage for their trailers. Apparently they stole music, too. And the lead guy or his daughter posed as buyers to spam forums. And the game apparently sucks, besides.
The best thread I've seen is at NeoGAF. Somebody eventually bought the game and posted screenshots to show how bad it is. They even failed to edit the default registry settings for the game installer. You can find support for all of my other accusations elsewhere in the same thread.
BTW, I also disagree with your logic. Even if all they did was use the other games' graphics as backgrounds, it would still be a rip-off. Keep in mind that they are trying to compete with the same games they are using.
Knowledge is the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify. (Ambrose Bierce)
Was I just imagining those advertisements on Pirate Bay?
I've said it before and I'll say it again, Slashdot has some weird thoughts on what moneymaking is.
Host pirated material and charge for ads: OK.
Burn pirated material on CD-Rs and charge: OK.
Burn pirated material on CD-Rs and put it in a shrinkwrapped box: WTF NOT OK THAT IS THEFT!!!
It makes me think that Microsoft et al need to invest more in PBRM: Pretty Box Rights Management. More of you guys would probably actually give a care then.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Steve: The project is more influenced by film and literature rather than other games, we want the experience to be as original as possible and as such we have made a calculated effort to keep away from other games in the genre. Limbo of the Lost is an experience first and foremost, secondly wrapped up in a game media and genre. Right...
Nobody has this game. Nobody ever heard of it until the plagiarism got scolded publicly. It is an elaborate publicity stunt.
That's why the psychopathic mind is so effective in trumping humans; people simply cannot conceive of another human being making such massive errors in judgment, such callous transgressions, that they literally fall over themselves to try to explain away those transgressions. --To rationalize and apologize for the criminal. Witness the Bush presidency. My favorite was when he began promoting the sending of jobs overseas; there was a week of stunned silence, and then a month of desperate rhetoric from the Republican supporters, trying to rationalize such a boneheaded move. Just watch the pattern here as it unfolds; if these game publishers are some form of psychotic, (sociopathic, narcissistic, psychopathic), they will A) NEVER admit that they were wrong in any manner which would require their egos to lose points, B) Somehow shift the blame to the victim, C) Lie and charm and lie and lie. They will not stop until they are forced to.
Just watch. Then map it large to the political realm to understand why the world is so desperately messed up.
-FL
http://forum.dead-code.org/index.php?action=profile;u=157;sa=showPosts Fascinating.
It's not the plot that's the issue here. It's the use of other people's assets (which is to say, art, design and particularly in this case, 3D models and associated textures) to create derivative works without the permission of the owner.
You could compare to it machinima, I suppose, but even then you'd generally want the permission of the owner of the original copyright before you try to commercially exploit something like this, something that the developers manifestly failed to get, or indeed even attempt to get.
When I was working at 3DO, we got back some songs from an outside shop for a game I was working on at the time. (It was a Might & Magic game that helped kill that franchise, sadly. The project was a trainwreck no matter how you slice it.)
The Director (the lead creative type) was a huge prankster. We had both worked on the Meridian 59 team before this project, so we were on good terms. He loaned me the soundtrack from The Matrix since it had just come out.
So, he sends out an email that they got back some songs, so if anyone wants to take a listen go ahead. I went and listen to the songs, and every single one of them was a synthesizer instrumental version or variation of "Rock is Dead" by Marilyn Manson (which is on the soundtrack I borrowed). Now, I thought this was a really elaborate practical joke, so I went to get a good laugh with him. The blank look on his face when I said, "Good joke, man," had me worried. So, I go load up the CD and the new music file and play them for him. He simply could not believe it, even after listening to it.
Basically, the outsourced music company had given the project to someone who slacked off and just handed in some BS. Well, that was their story, at least.
In the end, I ended up saving 3DO from a pretty major copyright infringement lawsuit; you know how friendly those RIAA people are about things like this. But, it didn't matter: the game still sucked horribly and I'm still ashamed to have worked on it.
Ah, good times, good times.
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
Go figure I write a story about a game stealing from another game and someone steals my story to make their own ;)
From my profile" Small time game, compiled from all stolen content - Monday June 16, @05:25PM - Rejected"
-=Lopton=-
Not to be boring but I'm pretty sure a company in the UK can call itself what it wants regardless of if a company in the states is using that name. Otherwise registering companies would get jolly tricky. This is why my email is googlemail and not gmail. Kind of. I think :) That said, Companies House doesnt seem to list a Majestic Studios.
In any case, yeah, this somewhat blew me away when i read it. They really must be out of their mind. I would absolutely hate to be them right now with the whole worlds gaming population essentially pointing the finger at them and saying 'twats'.
jaymz
There's a wiki for cataloging all the rip-offs and the pathetic background: see http://lotl.wikia.com/wiki/Limbo_of_the_Lost_Wiki
They have not copied any of the games' original assets, they have taken static 2d screen-shots of them. This is directly comparable to real world photography.
In this case it is defiantly very lame, probably illegal (breaking the original games' EULAs at least), but hardly immoral.
with Steve Bovis, whose job was to "put the game together and create all the visuals, coding, sounds, models, marketing and basically make the game flow and work. As well as manage and try to motivate the team."
http://www.justadventure.com/Interviews/Limbo/SteveBovis.shtm
The buck stops here.
by "Limbo of the Lost" would look as sweet.
And so would "Thief 3", were it not "Thief 3" called,
retain that beautiful-texture mapping which it owes
without that title. "Limbo of the Lost," lose that name
and for those graphical assets which are not original
take more screenshots.
i feel i should begin apologizing now...
Who owns the copyright to rendered images? The game manufacturer or you? After all, a screenshot of a rendered image created by a raycasting engine is not a digital bit-by-bit copy of the data model and textures built into the game. A screenshot is a recording of that unique perspective in the game that the player experienced, which is highly dependent on the actual graphics hardware of the PC and the settings for the hardware and software configuration. It also varies by time, position, viewing angles, and placement of other players.
Let's say you love FPS games (Quake,Unreal,etc) and you build a website (with revenue generating ads) around awesome screenshots and movie recordings of insane frag sessions (see YouTube). Are you guilty of copyright infringement? No. So, why would these guys be guilty? They used screenshots of rendered scenes and therefore did not use exact digital copies of the textures on disk.
If I use a raycasting engine and I set it up to raycast a scene, then I own the copyright to that rendered image, not the owner of the raycaster. It is the same here, however rather than specifying "sphere at x1,y1 and retangle at x2,y2", I am creating the scene by positioning the viewport.
Let's take another angle on this. I write a movie script and I want to set it to animation, so I use an FPS game to act it out. I merge the audio and video and put it up on my for profit website. Am I guilty of copyright infringement? No. It's an original work using rendered images from a raycasting engine. (This has been done quite a number of times.)
Before you use the "for profit" defense, know that for USA copyright law a violation without profit or without profit motive is still actionable by the copyright holder (see RIAA). Likewise, the inverse of profiting from copyright infringement is no guarantee of conviction. Profit is irrelevant in regard to guilt, but can be relevant with assessing damages awarded.
Also, some will likely respond to this post saying conviction of infringement is not based on making exact duplicates, but rather is in the fact you made a low grade copy or used small snippets of the copyrighted data. That really doesn't apply here because a rendered scene is data generated on the fly driven by user inputs and configuration settings of the machine. It is not a duplication of the textures and models on the disk. It's not valid to draw a parallel between an exact or low grade copy of a song to that of a data model rendered to an image, because a rendered image is not a version of the model, but a low grade copy of a song is a version of the original.
Last point. Is this game a derivative and thus potentially a violation of the copyright holder's exclusive rights to derivatives? No, because this guy's game uses no shared code. No shared model data. No shared textures. He used rendered scenes. If it were a derivative, then we could also apply this argument to compilers and say all compiler owners own the code you compiled, given that we're associating the raycasting engine to compiler and source code to scene setup. That happens to be an ancient debate: a compiler compiles source code to a binary, so who owns the binary? The compiler manufacturer or you? This ties back into the point of the previous paragraph. A work cannot be a derivative if it is not a version of the original--in part or in whole.
Considering all of this, I'm going out on a limb here and saying he did nothing wrong and is completely innocent. And additionally, just about everyone here is off their rocker on this topic.
Although, I still think he's a lame ass but that's irrelevent.
Camping on quad since 1996.
Those are all my favorite games! Finally somone's figured out to combine them all and create one AWESOME FUCKING GAME!
HELL YEAH! Who's with me!?
Please call me Rob, Vanilla Ice was a concoction of the recording industry.
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
This seems to me like the work of one mis-guided 'artist' they hired, rather than an entire team's effort to attempt to fool the entire world. I would guess this 'artist' found the work too time-consuming so he just started taking screenshots of other games and throwing them in there. I highly doubt this was a concerted effort on the part of the entire team. It would be funny if it were though.
All is prevelant in the world...
I'm incorporated myself, but that doesn't mean I'm pro-corporation. It does make me a bit of a hypocrite, but when in Rome you really do have to do as the Romans. That doesn't mean I can't lobby against the idea. Anyhow, it seems to me that a corporation on
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