Pac-Man, General Computer reverse-engineered nuclear war arcade game Missile Command, made it more challenging, and then represented the game to arcade operators as Super Missile Attack. Today, it's difficult to imagine someone releasing a paid add-on for, say, Grand Theft Auto 5, and pretending that it's an entirely new game, without there being extreme and rapid legal implications. Only General Computer would take the money. Pac-Man, in its original form of Crazy Otto, sat on a significant base of code from Pac-Man, but the makers of the original game were never supposed to be paid. Golson's speech reveled in how he and his comrades ran rings around the arcade manufacturers. In the head-spinning years of hits like Missile Command, Donkey Kong and Pac-Man, the legal implications of modifying someone else's work and selling it on as one's own were fuzzy. We might recognize this as "modding," but it's more complex than that. It was, essentially, the same game, with various improvements. Their original Pac-Man mod was a game called Crazy Otto. Pac-Man's creators, Steve Golson, looked back at his days as part of the gang of brilliant and opportunistic hackers who ripped open successful arcade games, and reconstituted and improved them. The legal implications of modifying someone else's work and selling it on were fuzzy.Īt last week's Game Developers Conference, one of Ms. In the early 1980s, the legal status of this activity was yet to be established. That company was called General Computer, and it made its living by modifying the work of others, and presenting that work as separate intellectual properties. distributor Midway and Japanese creator Namco as a new game. But still, it's a humdinger.Ī group of MIT drop-outs deconstructed the original game, made significant improvements and sold the additional modifying code back to U.S. Pac-Manhas been told before and is well known, especially among those fascinated by the raucous early days of the coin-op boom.
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