Hi Neo, Well, to be honest there is a presedents for being a little antagonistic towards game companies and their products. I myself have been at the receiving end mor than once.
For example, in 2004 a person named James North was in the process of making a retro remake of Montezuma's Revenge for the Vi community. In 2006 he decided to get out of the game business and I took over several of his products. Early in 2008 I had pretty much completed Montezuma's Revenge when I got a notice from the copyright holder to stop all production of the title. Since I had just put two entire years into that project I was reasonably angry with them. All the same I agreed to the terms and started over, from scratch, with Mysteries of the Ancients. I think what burns my tail more than anything is Montezuma's Revenge had been put out by Parker Brother's in 1984 for the Atari 2600 and later for the Atari 5200. It did well for the time, but let's face it that game hasn't been sold in over 25 years. Creating a retro remake of that game would have not hurt their profits, nor effected the company in anyway. Still they insisted on enforcing their copyrights even though the game itself is dead. Anyone with sight can just grab the rom for the original Montezuma's Revenge from an Atari fan site and fire it up in Stella whatever. I think the copyright holder in that case is just being a jurk. So you ask why I'm a little antagonistic towards Lucas Arts and a trademark like Star Wars. Well, about three or four years ago I tracked down contact information for Lucas Licensing about properly licensing the Star Wars trademark and to get official permission to produce accessible versions of some of my favorite Star Wars games like Jedi Knight, Rebel Asult, Dark Forces, etc. Well, they gave me a load of crap about how those titles were exclusive to Lucas Arts and if I wanted to properly license the Star Wars trademarks and names I'd have to basically end up owing them thousands of dollars in licensing fees. When I try to explain to them I was a blind developer, was only expecting to sell maybe 1,000 copies, and wouldn't be able to raise the kind of money they are expecting they gave me a flat out no. When I asked them if I could release the games as freeware they still wanted me to legally license the trademark weather I sold a single game or not. Ummm...Isn't there something wrong with this picture? Now, I think I have good reason to not only be antagonistic but outright upset with that sort of treatment. I'm not out to make millions off their trademark, but I do want to create some free or commercial Star wars games for a very limited nitch market without the threat of being sued. Doing so would not effect Lucas Arts or any other branch of Lucas Film financially as they obviously don't consider us a target market else they would have made all their games accessible already. The point I'm getting at is unlike modding your favorite game using their tools, their engine, etc they force me to write the entire game from scratch without a dimes worth of financial compensation. Further more if I do so without the trademark being properly licensed I can technically be sued for copyright infringement. Weather they actually go through with it or not is beside the point. They could have at least approved it as long as it was free or something like that, but clearly I didn't have the money they wanted so their attitude was "get lost." However, I do agree with you about criticising through creation. I do feel if I took one of Lucas Arts games, say Dark Forces, and make it accessible it would be an excellent example of how one of their older games can be updated and improved. After all, that game was designed for Windows 95, uses DirectX 6, and hasn't been in stores for at least 12 years. In fact, all of the Star Wars games I remember from high school Jedi Knight, Jedi Knight II, Dark Forces, Rebel Assault, you name it were all games from the early to mid 1990's. Creating a free updated version isn't exactly going to hurt Lucas Arts sales any since they aren't currently selling them anyway. They have no reason to get anal about the whole thing. Cheers! On 11/30/10, neoph...@inthecompanyofgrues.com <neoph...@inthecompanyofgrues.com> wrote: > > Okay, so I'm not entirely sure why the tone in a lot of messages regarding > brands, such as Star Wars, is antagonistic, especially given sites such as > this one: > > http://www.starwarsfanworks.com/ > > The real problem of copyright comes from making money from brands that > aren't yours, or directly causing a loss of sales (for example, uploading > a pirated version of a game they have for sale to a torrent site). > > Most companies are more than happy for people to engage with their brands, > so long as they are respectful of them, and aren't attempting to rip them > off commercially. > > If you really want a game dev to take notice of you, make something > extraordinary with their brand or their tools. That's how half the stars > of the modding community get tight with devs such as Valve or Bungie. > > There's a saying I've become particularly fond of lately: > > Criticise through creation. > > Don't tear people or companies down through criticism. Show them what can > be done by being creative. > > Cheers, > > Neo --- Gamers mailing list __ Gamers@audyssey.org If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to gamers-unsubscr...@audyssey.org. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/gam...@audyssey.org. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to gamers-ow...@audyssey.org.