07-16-2021, 01:18 PM
N-OS X-tasy! wrote:
[quote=Will Collier]
[quote=N-OS X-tasy!]
What it would have been is copyright infringement, if not properly licensed.
Google "Pac-Man bootlegs" sometime. There were umpty-zillion of them... but I'm sure Namco and Sesame Street could have found a rea$on to make a legit deal.
I'm guessing none of those bootlegs was put out by as well-known an organization with as much to lose as the Children's Television Workshop.
I don't disagree about the likelihood of them coming to a financial agreement, though.
That industry was very weird about copyright. Atari made a Jaws game in the mid-70's that was just a blatant cash-in on the movie, without a license. They were worried enough to set up a shell company to release it in case Universal sued (and botched that by still printing ATARI on the motherboards), but nothing ever happened.
Later on, a bunch of MIT undergraduates coded up a souped-up version of Pac-Man called Crazy Otto that they were going to sell to game operators as a daughtercard upgrade. Namco got wind of it and threatened to sue, but when they saw how good the actual game was they bought the code instead. That was a very cagey move, as a revised version became Ms. Pac-Man, one of the biggest hits of all time.
The same group had already released a Missile Command upgrade and gotten sued by Atari, but the suit got settled when Atari just hired them all as game developers, about the same time as they made their deal with Namco for Crazy Otto...