Atari Threatens to Sue a Former Atari Developer for 'Copying' His Own Game

​Atari wants game developer and Llamasoft founder Jeff Minter to stop selling his game, TxK, because it is too similar to Tempest 2000, a game that Atari still owns the rights to, but which Minter also developed in 1994.

Legally, there's no doubt that Atari has a case. The similarities between the two "tunnel shooters" are undeniable, featuring the same neon on black vector graphics, geometric shapes, and gameplay. As Atari said in ​a letter to Minter, Minter himself has promoted TxK as a spiritual successor to Tempest 2000, as did many of the game's positive reviews.

The letter asks Minter to stop selling TxK on Sony's handheld gaming system the PlayStation Vita, destroy all copies of the game in his possession, pay Atari damages, and return any confidential information in his possession that helped him design a game so similar to Tempest 2000.

I don't think Minter could fully satisfy Atari on that last demand unless it wants to pull his brain right out of his skull. The original Tempest was developed by Dave Theurer in 1981. In 1994, Minter single-handedly remade the game for Atari as Tempest 2000, updating it for a new generation with his signature psychedelic style.

Minter doesn't need any documentation because he's infringing on his own work.

"If the creator of the game were going after someone else, it might feel different, but this is one of those cases where copyright, which we generally think as being in favor of the artist, drifts away from that and it works in favor of the publisher or the distributor," Electronic Frontier Foundation copyright expert Parker Higgins told me.

Tempest 2000.

Higgins said that Atari's claims reminded him of the Fogerty, Inc v. Fantasy case, in which the record company with the exclusive publishing rights to the Creedence Clearwater Revival song "Run Through the Jungle," sued John Fogerty, the former lead singer of the band, for copyright infringing his own work during his solo career with the song "The Old Man Down the Road."

Fogerty won that case and even took Fantasy to the US Supreme Court to get paid back for his legal fees. Minter, it seems, will not be able to put up such a fight. He ​says that lawyers have advised him it would be too expensive to fight Atari, and that TxK didn't exactly make him rich.

"I think they [Atari] thought I was somehow making loads and loads of money on the Vita version of TxK, I guess because it did garner excellent reviews and a bit of positive press," he said. "But the Vita isn't a massive market, TxK made back its development advance and a bit more and that was it."

This is a supreme bummer because Atari's threats for now ensure that Minter won't release TxK o​n more platforms, namely the PlayStation 4 and PC, where it could find a larger audience. It's also little scary to think who else Atari and similar companies might be able to go after in the future.

Games are an incredibly iterative form and mostly that's not a problem. Call of Duty figures out that putting a little X on your crosshairs makes it clear when you hit another player, and the next year every other multiplayer shooter does it. At the Game Developers Conference, developers share best practices with their colleagues openly. It's one reason games have been able to advance so rapidly.

Atari and the copyright to Tempest and their other games have changed hands multiple times since the company's glory days in the '80s. There are many games out there that are clearly inspired by old Atari games, and even multiple Tempest clones that they could go after. So far, it seems, they went after Minter because he made the best one.

"I could never have imagined one day being savaged by its [Atari's] undead corpse, my own seminal work turned against me," Minter said. "I am beyond disgusted."

If companies start buying other publishers and developers and look through their newly acquired copyrights to see where they might have a case, it could get ugly.

As Higgins told me, just like with other patent and copyright trolls, the danger isn't necessarily when they go after a couple of high profile people. "The danger is that they could shut down lower profile people without much effort at all," he said. "Or they just create this chilling effect, where no one, especially in video games, where whole genres and styles are deemed off-limits because there's a big scary copyright troll in this space."