Gaming Plagiarism!

[Revan]

Rip-off." It's an oft-heard allegation where video games are concerned. These days it's World War II-themed squad-based combat and urban warfare sandbox mass-murder simulators. In 1993 it was first-person shooters. In 1986 it was side-scrolling mascot platformers. In 1980 it was maze games. Sometimes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Sometimes it's grounds for a lawsuit.

This could easily be a piece on how popular, innovative games invariably spawn a succession of imitators. But not only is that rather old-hat as far as video game feature-writing is concerned, it would be a piece on genre creation, not plagiarism. And labeling as the latter would be smearing the entire video game industry with the charge. This would be, at the very least, hypocritical: plagiarism has long been the foundation of the writer's humble craft. (For example, that last sentence was stolen from somewhere. Hell even this whole article has been stolen from someplace)

So it is not in this article that you will find references to the Congo Bongos and the Bubsy 3Ds of the world. No, this is about serious plagiarism, the sort of copyright-infringement stuff that makes the lawyers come running. Half of these games spawned court cases; the other half by all rights should have. (And although these two themes intersect quite a bit, neither is this an article on game-related legislation: that one can be found elsewhere.)


Everyone For Tennis
The first two arcade games created by the brains behind Atari were Computer Space and Pong. One was a massive hit; one was not. You probably already know this. What you may not know is that both were near-carbon copies of other projects.

Computer Space was a near-clone of Spacewar, the two-player dueling spaceships game created on an early computer by MIT students in the 1960s. Founder Nolan Bushnell's concept was to bring Spacewar out of the MIT science labs and into pizza parlors. It flopped, partially due to confusing control scheme but also perhaps because Computer Space was a single-player game. The next game, the first to bear the Atari name and the first to become a hit, only had a two-player mode.

Much has been made, and rightly so, of the fact that Pong was so clearly spawned from the tennis game on the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home game console. What many people neglect to point out, mainly because so few of them have actually had the opportunity to play an Odyssey, is that Pong made giant improvements on the original design. The capabilities of the Odyssey were severely limited; besides being monochrome, it could only draw two thick, chunky lines for paddles, a moving ball, and another thick line down the center of the screen to demarcate the two halves of the 'court', which was otherwise unrepresented. Users kept score by themselves, on a pad of paper that was helpfully included in the box.

But its failings weren't simply visual. The game actually kind of sucked, too. There were three dials you had to manipulate all at once -- one for vertical paddle movement, another for horizontal, and another to add English on to the ball after it rebounded off your paddle, flying out of bounds (not to mention directly into the face of everything we know about physics).

Pong, meanwhile, had a score display, a more defined court (drawn in slimmer, more aesthetically pleasing black and white lines), and only one dial -- the paddle only moved up and down, but players could add "spin" by moving it quickly as the ball rebounded. It was quite clearly the superior product.

This didn't stop Magnavox from suing Atari, however. The case was pretty much open-and-shut considering that Magnavox had Nolan Bushnell's signature in the guest book from the Odyssey trade show demonstration. Most writers, at this point in the story, say "the courts sided with Magnavox" or "Atari lost the case." This isn't true. Actually, the case never went to court. Atari and Magnavox worked out an out-of-court settlement by which Atari paid Magnavox a one-time, $700,000 licensing fee. This set a precedent by which anyone who wanted to create a video game tennis machine could do it legally by paying royalties to Magnavox.

Quite a few companies eagerly signed up. For the next few years, the video game industry was built on clones of and variations on one game.


Hangly for Money
But Pong and its clones didn't monopolize the arcades for long. A string of industry-shaking hits followed at the rate of about one per year, and every time a new concept touched down, dozens of imitators followed in its wake. The next bombshell hit was Space Invaders, which in and of itself was a variation on the gameplay of Breakout, Atari's break-the-bricks game -- which was itself conceived of as a single-player version of Pong.

Space Invaders did indeed spawn a host of imitators. And the next year, when Namco's Pac-Man created an even larger international stir, clones of the addictive maze game were soon to follow. Many of these were not direct copies of the game, but rather like the "rip-offs" we see today: new games that expanded on the original concept, effectively creating a "genre." Examples of this include Ladybug, Mouse Trap, and Thief.

But some were simply knock-offs. Looking at a list of names of Pac-Man clones is pretty much enough to send anyone into a giggle fit: Puc-One, New Puck-X, Pak Pak Man, Newpuc2, Puck Monster, and of course everyone's favorite: Hangly Man, made by a Japanese company called Nittoh. I'm not sure why the phrase "Hangly Man" is so funny; maybe it's because it sounds vaguely dirty, like the title of a bad adult movie or something. In any case it's a terrible misspelling of the word "Hungry." And the game itself is in most respects indistinguishable from Pac-Man.

Oddly enough, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that Namco ever went after Pac-Man knockoffs in court. The only case that stemmed from a Pac-clone wasn't initiated by Namco -- it was by Atari, who had licensed the home version of the game for its 2600 console.


Munchkin Lands In Court
In 1981, Magnavox -- the company that released the first ever home video game system -- was getting its ass handed to it by Atari. The Odyssey2 wasn't nearly as popular as the Atari 2600, and when Atari sewed up the exclusive rights to the world's hottest video game, Magnavox knew it had to do something. So it whipped up K.C. Munchkin, a dot-munching maze game starring a fuzzy little whatsit. Atari whipped up a lawsuit.

The odd thing was, K.C. Munchkin really wasn't that similar to Pac-Man. Rather than a screen full of static dots, there were actually only twelve on the screen at any time -- and they moved around the maze, meaning that K.C. had to chase them down and corner them to eat them, all while avoiding the monsters that were chasing him. It wasn't necessarily an objectively better game, but it was certainly far more removed from Pac-Man than games like Ladybug and Thief (not to mention Hangly Man). And it was definitely more fun than Atari's terrible home version of Pac-Man.

But what the court ended up deciding (quoted at the website Patent Arcade was that "it is enough that substantial parts were lifted; no plagiarist can excuse the wrong by showing how much of his work he did not pirate" and that "the sine qua non of the ordinary observer test ... is the overall similarities rather than the minute differences between the two works." Magnavox lost, and K.C. Munchkin was pulled from shelves permanently.

At the time, this seemed like the death knell for any video game that had a similar "look and feel" to one that came before. Wrote Bill Kunkel, who served as an expert witness for Magnavox in the trial, "Atari was attempting something that was, in my opinion, illegal and dangerous to the continued success of the entire electronic gaming industry."

How is it, then, that the video game industry is not now embroiled in all sorts of lawsuits every time someone creates a first-person shooter that swipes significant "overall similarities" from Halo? Part of the answer is that although the original decision seemed to set a serious precedent, other such rip-off games that followed were never pursued in court.


Gender Equality
In his book Masters of Doom, David Kushner tells the story of how id founders John Carmack and John Romero got started making PC games. At first, the two Johns had set out to try and score a gig with Nintendo by recreating Super Mario Bros. on the PC. This was only possible after Carmack, the programming genius, hit upon a method of scrolling the playfield, which the other team members didn't think was possible on the 8086 processor.

The team sent their creation, a pitch-perfect version of the first level of Super Mario Bros., to Nintendo. Nintendo politely complimented their work but told them they had no need for such a product. Undaunted, they made their own side-scrolling game, which turned out to be the groundbreaking Commander Keen. What they did not do is release their carbon copy Mario game.

This wasn't the case for every ambitious game programming team, however. One group, called Rainbow Arts, released a game for a variety of different PC platforms, including Atari ST and Commodore 64, called Great Giana Sisters. Now, this was the age of the side-scrolling mascot action title, and there wasn't a game design firm on the planet that wasn't engaged in creating their own.

But Great Giana Sisters went further than the average Mario wannabe -- it really did blatantly copy the look and underlying design of Super Mario Bros. Giana (and her sister Maria) could find powerups that let them break bricks with their heads, shoot bubbles (if not fireballs), collect 100 diamonds (if not coins) for an extra life... the works.

And it got even more blatant. There were eight worlds of four levels each. Level 1 was above ground, and the opening cluster of bricks mimicked SMB's. The first enemy was an owl that looked suspiciously like a Goomba. Level 2 was underground. Level 3 was on a series of platforms that crossed a vast chasm. Level 4 was the boss' lair. Sounding familiar?

Well, it's nothing compared to...


The Axe Effect
Great Giana Sisters can be somewhat forgiven, seeing as how it was produced by a tiny shareware outfit. But Golden Axe Warrior is just plain unbelievable. From the title, you might imagine that it's a gimped version of Sega's classic side-scrolling slash-em-up series for the Master System. In reality, it's a Legend of Zelda clone that has little to do with the series whose name it bears.

Much like the Sisters' adventure above, this isn't a Zelda clone only in the sense that it is a top-down action RPG with dungeons and items. Those were rampant, too, in the post-Zelda years. Golden Axe Warrior goes far beyond that. You might notice, perhaps to throw people off, they just copied the little guy from Dragon Warrior instead of Link. Clever, but its true identity as a Zelda rip-off is easily spotted the first time you leave the town and enter a forest of round trees which contain pig monsters that walk erect and throw spears at you.

But surely that could be passed off as a coincidence? Maybe, but what happens when you find the game's first dungeon... set off on an island... connected by a wooden bridge... inside a large brown rock with other brown rocks set around it? Would that remind you a bit too much of the entrance to Zelda's first dungeon?

How about inside, where the enemies are walking, sword-carrying skeletons and bats that fly around, then rest a little while, then fly around again? What about when the door locks behind you, then opens again when you finish killing them (and here's a key for your troubles, as well)? And why is this music so familiar?

Put simply, to play Golden Axe Warrior for an hour is to be shocked at the developers' apparent complete and total lack of shame. Sadly, for as carefully as they copied Zelda's mechanics and dungeon designs, they failed to make the gameplay much fun. But every now and again, a clone comes along that so thoroughly outdoes the original that people would rather not believe it was a clone at all.


Vampires, Ninjas, Whatever
This is the subject that can get a writer in trouble. There isn't a child-of-NES out there who doesn't have fond memories of Ninja Gaiden. But that doesn't mean the seminal swords-and-shuriken adventure didn't borrow heavily off another game. Specifically, it's difficult to ignore the similarities between it and Castlevania. Just comparing the screens should be evidence enough: if the identical PLAYER/ENEMY life bar setup doesn't convince you, the slash-lanterns-to-find-weapons gimmick should.

More evidence that Ninja Gaiden copied Castlevania comes from the fact that the arcade original was completely different. If anything, it was actually a clone of Double Dragon. Walk-to-the-right-and-punch-everything-in-the-face games were becoming big business in the arcades, and just about the only thing that really separated Ninja Gaiden from the rest is that its main character wore a cowl instead of a giant bouffant hairdo.

But to leave off here would be to ignore the crucial improvements that Ninja Gaiden made. There were the cinematic scenes between levels, of course. But most important were the controls. Simon Belmont painfully lumbered along at a speed somewhere between "turtle" and "crippled turtle," but Ryu Hayabusa ran fast and could stick to walls like magic.

So it's actually a bit sad that Ninja Gaiden petered right out after two sequels that were just as fun but ultimately far too similar to the original; there just weren't that many creative ideas flowing from the team once they got past "make the guy stick to walls." Luckily, it was Castlevania that quickly shed its extra pounds, later reinventing itself by... well, by ripping off Super Metroid.


Rewriting History
A decade after the K.C. Munchkin suit, another video game came before the courts with the same allegations against it. Capcom had hit a gold mine with Street Fighter II, and every arcade game manufacturer and their sister just had to have a competing fighting game on the market. SNK was churning out new fighting game franchises at the rate of about one per week, and some of these came pretty close to SFII's design at times. World Heroes, for one, had a few characters and special moves that mimicked the feel of SFII.

But of all of the various wannabes, the one game that ended up drawing Capcom's legal ire was Fighter's History, from Data East. Capcom alleged that eight of the game's nine playable characters were modeled on SFII's famous cast, and that the majority of the game's special moves were taken from Capcom's game. As evidence, they presented not only the game itself but Data East's design documents, which made numerous references to Street Fighter II.

With the precedents set by the King Kong and K.C. Munchkin cases, this seemed to be another open-and-shut case of infringement. But amazingly, Data East got off. Bill Kunkel was again called as an expert witness for the defense, and this time he and Data East's legal team pulled together a great body of evidence showing that many of Capcom's original designs for Street Fighter characters were pulled from Japanese cultural sources in the first place.

Of course, if you play Fighter's History you can tell pretty quickly where Data East was getting its game design, and it was not from the rich store of Japanese history. The gameplay is entirely identical to SFII's. Pick the character "Mizoguchi" and note how many of his six standard punches and kicks are animated identically to Ryu's. And I bet you can make him throw a fireball without even reading the instructions.

Probably the only reason Data East didn't end up eating a serious fine is because this case was tried in Actual Court, not Gamer's Court, which would be a good concept for a G4 television show. The lawyer would say, "Can you tell me, Mr. East, exactly what Japanese cultural icon was the common premise for a blond-haired guy in military fatigues whose two martial arts moves are a crescent-shaped fireball and a somersault kick?" And it would be over, right there.


Not Really Rip-OffsAtari did face quite a bit of competition in the early days, but its biggest rival wasn't a rival at all. In public, Atari and Kee Games were bitter enemies: co-founder Joe Keenan had supposedly split off from Bushnell, stealing equipment, game concepts, and some of the company's best engineers and designers. Behind the scenes, it was all an elaborate scam: Kee was part and parcel of Atari, and the competition between the two was concocted to get around the amusement machine distribution schemes of the time (the distributors wanted exclusive contracts, but there were often two or more distributors in any given area).

Atari would create a new game, then, Kee would introduce its own version. And vice versa, since to keep up appearances, the two companies did maintain separate offices and staffers.

The arrangement came to an end when Steve Bristow, an engineer who was working at the Kee offices, came up with a game that wasn't just another Pong clone. Tank pitted two tanks against each other on a battlefield cluttered with segments of walls, bringing a newly strategic approach to the one-on-one shooting pioneered in Spacewar.

Now, distributors wanted out of their exclusive contracts so they could all have Tank, and Atari and Kee were happy to oblige: the companies soon "merged." Later, Tank became the basis for Combat, the cartridge packed in with every 2600.


You Knew Somebody Would
It's well-known that after the release of Donkey Kong, Nintendo became involved in a drawn-out court battle with Universal Studios over the question of whether Donkey Kong infringed on the King Kong movie, to which Universal claimed the rights. What is not so well-known is that the case came about because of a company that wanted to create a Donkey Kong ripoff for the Atari 2600.

Tiger Electronics, whose main business was in handheld LCD games, approached Universal for the King Kong license. This struck some in the company as odd, because the King Kong license was not exactly the hot property in 1981 that it is today thanks to Peter Jackson. In fact, notes Steven Kent in his book The Ultimate History of Video Games, the only other company to which Universal was licensing the King Kong name was Ben Cooper, producers of cheap children's Halloween costumes.

So Universal granted Tiger the license on some pretty sweet terms. Only later did they find out about Donkey Kong, quickly realizing that Tiger's game was planned to be identical. Universal quickly moved to sue Nintendo and Coleco (who were producing the home version of the game), but first wanted to make sure that Tiger's game was different enough from Donkey Kong. So they had Tiger change the platforms from angled to horizontal, the barrels to bombs, and the main character to a firefighter.

This turned out to not be enough. The courts found that Nintendo was entirely in the clear (as it turns out, Universal didn't own the rights to King Kong in the first place), but that Tiger and Universal had indeed infringed on Nintendo's copyrights to Donkey Kong with their King Kong game. Nintendo collected every penny of Universal's royalties for the game, totaling $56,689.41.

It probably goes without saying that the game isn't very good, either.


Mario + Dhalsim = This
It is one of the cardinal rules of video game journalism, I think it's in the union contract or something, that if you write anything about Fighter's History you have to mention that Karnov was the final boss. I'll do it, I mean, I don't want to get fined or anything. But I'm starting to wonder if anybody's going to care anymore. Half the people reading this probably have no idea that Karnov was originally the overweight shirtless star of his own NES platform game, kind of a fire-breathing version of the Iron Sheik.

Knowing what we know about Fighter's History, though, it begs the question: did Data East put Karnov into the game for nostalgic purposes, or because since he breathed fire they could just give him Dhalsim's special moves? Probably a little from column A, a little from column B. Not only does Karnov have two moves which are probably best described as the Yoga Fire and the Yoga Flame, but when you get hit with them you reel back in the exact same "hey, I'm on fire" animation as in Street Fighter II. Classy.


Don't Give Me the Innocent Babe-in-the-Woods Routine, Karen
Over the last few pages, Nintendo has been getting ripped off forwards and backwards. As you might have imagined. But I don't want to give the impression that they didn't do their fair share of borrowing during the early days of the video game industry, either.

Space Invaders, right? Nope -- it's actually Space Fever, one of the first arcade games produced by Nintendo. Lest certain internet forums break out into a rash of OMG TAITO COPIED NINTENDO threads, I'll be very clear: it was Space Fever that was the ripoff. Much like how America was taken over by Pong and clones in the 1970s, a few years later, you couldn't swing a dead neko in Japan without hitting a Space Invaders machine. The fad was so prevalent that all sorts of imitation machines sprouted up.

After hiring Shigeru Miyamoto (whose first project was creating artwork for Radarscope, a ripoff of Namco's game Galaxian), Nintendo moved into more of an industry leader role, creating the industry trends rather than following in them. But it would be tough to argue that Balloon Fight, one of the most fondly remembered NES classics, wasn't ganked directly from Williams' arcade hit Joust.