News Atari threats kill Jeff Minter's TxK

Another reason why devs should NEVER sell their souls to publishers, and retain major controls to their hardwork.

Jeff gets my full sympathy. Sad news.

 

Sheesh, this is a blast from the past,

I used to spend waaaay to much time playing Tempest in the arcades back in the dim and distant past. Shame its been canned but perhaps is best left as a fond memory.

 

Minter, ummm, didn't create Tempest. He created a SEQUEL.
If you wanna take the "creator ownership" angle... David Theurer created Tempest(based it on a nightmare he had, in fact), and Minter didn't get authorization from Theurer to make Tempest 2000 OR TxK (... or Tempest 3000, or the best-forgotten Space Giraffe).


Now, whether Atari or anyone else should be able to claim copyright on a genre and a collection of geometric shapes is highly debatable(especially given Atari is rather obviously not making anything at all).

 

Thank you for the correction. I never knew that and its good to have a little history lesson!

100% agree. I feel copyrighting and patenting has always been out of control and stunts growth. As for patent trolling ... aargh!

 

I definitely didn't read this as "Atari threatens to kill Jeff Minter"

 

Sounds like Jeff Minter was in the wrong here. Not entirely surprised by this, he was always slightly unhinged from reality... in a good way. Trip-a-Tron was awesome

 

Not quite.

From what I understand, you can’t copyright a game concept. You can copyright assets such as art, code, sound effects, music, etc, but you can’t copyright a game concept. Otherwise Rockstar could have sued the pants off Volition/Deep Silver for releasing Saints Row – or indeed Ubisoft for Watch Dogs – because they’re roughly the same sort of thing as GTA.

You should take a look at what “Atari” are actually alleging. They are flinging outright lies at him – such as copying the soundtrack from Tempest 2000 when in fact the soundtrack for TxK is completely original – and it would cost so much money to legally refute these lies that it basically becomes impossible.

They’re also conveniently forgetting their own history: Minter had a royalty agreement with Atari stating that he would receive royalties for any ports of the Tempest 2000 code. He alleges that the developer of the PlayStation port of Tempest 2000 (Tempest X) was ordered by Atari to make Tempest X just different enough from Tempest 2000 that it was legally a different game, and thus avoid royalties on porting Tempest 2000 code – even though Tempest X contained a playable version of Tempest 2000.

 

Feels like the whole Blurred Lines copyright case. Similar doesn't mean copyright infringement!

 

Llamatron.


That game was epic.

 

agreed.