Sega of America has filed a patent infringement suit against an entertainment division of Fox, Fox Interactive, Electronic Arts and game developer Radical Entertainment alleging that The Simpsons Road Rage, released in late 2001 and nowadays a million-selling title, is a deliberate imitation of arcade favourite Crazy Taxi.
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The suit, filed in San Francisco federal court, names Fox Filmed Entertainment, Fox Interactive (a former Fox unit which is now controlled by VU Games), Road Rage publisher Electronic Arts and developer Radical Entertainment as defendants. Ironically, Radical went on to work for VU Games as developer of The Simpsons Hit & Run, another game which critics felt 'borrowed heavily' from existing genre titles.
According to court documents, Sega is alleging that Simpsons Road Rage was designed to 'deliberately copy and imitate', citing several reviews. Sega, it seems, holds a patent on the style of gameplay in Crazy Taxi, in which players take the role of a goofy taxi driver to deliver various folks to their destinations as quickly and smoothly (but usually destructively) as possible. Sega believes they are fully entitled to a cut of the game's earnings, and they want it off the shelves, too.
Virtually nobody connected with the case was prepared to comment on Thursday when the suit was first reported on Reuters, but it will definitely be an interesting one to watch, because we'll happily bet there are more than a few developers and publishers out there eager to safeguard their own creative formulas. In fact, so concerned were Nintendo earlier this year that the innovative Mario 128 might be copied, that they actually held it back from E3 in order to protect its ideas.
On the other side of the coin though, the suit could be very damaging for a lot of publishers and developers in an industry where imitation is often the only way to guarantee sales. A result in Sega's favour would certainly lessen the likelihood of any more uninspired Simpsons games turning up - given that Simpsons Skateboarding was a Tony Hawk clone, Road Rage was allegedly a Crazy Taxi rip-off and Hit & Run made liberal use of Rockstar North's Grand Theft Auto for inspiration. As long as their are patents to back things up, it seems, there's the potential to press the case. Whether that applies in any other areas is something we'll presumably learn if the litigation goes Sega's way...
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Publisher Sega of America has filed a patent infringement suit with a San Francisco federal court, claiming that Fox Interactive's Simpsons Road Rage copies patented gameplay elements from Sega's own Crazy Taxi series.
Naming Fox Interactive, Electronic Arts and developer Radical Entertainment as defendants, the suit claims that Simpsons Road Rage was designed to 'deliberately copy and imitate' the Crazy Taxi gameplay formula, for which it would appear that Sega holds a patent.
Sega, which cites a number of reviews as part of its evidence of this patent infringement, wants a cut of the game's profits to date (a not insubstantial figure, given that Simpsons Road Rage has become a million-selling title since its launch in late 2001) and wants it taken off the shelves to boot.
Although, like many such cases, it's entirely likely that this suit will never see the inside of a courtroom, so no legal precedent will be set, industry observers are likely to watch it keenly regardless. Whichever way a ruling in this case was to go, it would be very important to the way that publishers and developers do business in an industry where a great many games are simply clones of a tried and tested formula developed elsewhere.
Ign The Simpsons Road Rage
We're in two minds about the case. In general we don't support efforts to widen the scope of patent law, particularly in terms of the sort of broader software patents which enable this kind of gameplay patenting - and we were somewhat shocked recently to learn that a respected British developer is apparently planning to apply for a patent on a form of 3D lighting code used in its latest game, causing anger in the traditionally very open 3D graphics programming and research community.
The Simpsons Road Rage All Cutscenes Youtube
Gameplay patents could arguably encourage more innovation in games and stem the flow of staid clones which follow on from every successful original title, which would certainly be a good thing. However, certain other less pleasant possibilities also arise from a verdict in Sega's favour in this case. Imagine a world where Bungie had patented the Halo control system - generally agreed as the logical best solution to controlling FPS games on console joypads. Other developers would be forced to adopt different and almost certainly inferior control mechanisms; and the person who really lost out in the end would be the consumer.