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Zynga Accused of Cloning Hit Indie iPhone Game Tiny Tower

Posted by samzenpus on from the we-did-it-first dept.

FrankPoole writes "Indie iPhone game developer Nimblebit is accusing social games giant Zynga of ripping off its popular mobile title Tiny Tower. Nimblebit's Ian Marsh got word out about the similarities between Dream Heights and Tiny Tower with an image that's still making the Twitter rounds. The image is made up of screenshots showing how Dream Heights' interface and gameplay mechanics appear strikingly similar to Tiny Tower's."

4 of 245 comments (clear)

  1. Game rules do not underlie copyright by Kirth · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html

    --
    "The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
  2. Sim Tower by Voxol · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower

    Or as they say, 'everything is a remix'.

    1. Re:Sim Tower by duk242 · · Score: 5, Informative

      I found TinyTower whilst looking for something similar to SimTower for my iPhone. It's quite obvious that TinyTower is inspired by SimTower, however it's not really all that much like what SimTower was. Zynga's version however is a direct copy of everything from TinyTower.

  3. Re:Happens all the time. by teg · · Score: 5, Informative

    Let's see... when I was a kid in the days of Apple ][, these neighbors of ours (Stoltzfus family) came up with a graphical programming language.

    They showed it to Apple, hoping that Apple would buy. Apple strongly considered it, and then returned it, saying that they weren't interested.

    A year later, they came out with Apple Logo, which was immensely popular.

    Logo was created in the 60s, turtles and all. It was popular on other systems as well in the early 80s, so it doesn't really seem to me that they did anything wrong here?