Passing off games as your own
We ran into a rather interesting case over the past day: Jukebox, which appeared as a type-in in YS ish 21 (1987), and later on the covertape of issue 69 (1991), with writing credits assumed by 2 other people. Shame on them! :mad:
Does anyone know of other cases of plagiarism like that?
Does anyone know of other cases of plagiarism like that?
Post edited by mheide on
Comments
http://www.ysrnry.co.uk/articles/letters23.htm
Gavin Smyth's Galactoids, which appeared as a ZX Computing type-in in April/May 1984 was slightly reworked by Michael and Craig Holdstock to become Cosmic Chaos, a Crash cover tape game.
Hot Shot, a YS type-in, appeared to be a blatant rip-off of an earlier Centipede game called Maggot. I believe the original was written by Jason Charlesworth and may have appeared as a listing in an early multi-format publication.
Egghead Website
Arcade Game Designer
My itch.io page
Harry Price surely deserves a mention too. [Edit: Doh! Jonathan beat me to it. Still, as a serial offender Harry deserves a couple of mentions. :-) ]
I disassembled it, rewrote it and turned it into a very nice utility. Still got the source code for it on my HD. I even used it to write a PC version which I still work on from time to time.
I wrote Mire Mare.
Got it on a tape round here somewhere...
Andrew
Yup, well documented, that one, not to mention the rather massive list sorted on The Italian Project
Very interesting, I hadn't heard about those yet.
The latter is in the archive (pending correction) and indeed it was originally written by Jason Charlesworth. It then appeared in Your Computer issue Nov '83, on page 134.
Seeing we have all MicroHobby issues in the archive, that could be checked!
I didn't, I converted it to MC and never published it anywhere...
Goddamit he got in there with first claim. It was legal complications like this which made me stop Ultimate from publishing in the first place.
I let Matthew Smith get away with it coz I liked him. He was only supposed to fix the Attic Bug.
Yeah... and we saw how well that worked... Lucky I stepped in and saved your arse at the last moment again!!
Andrew
Kizza has gone barking mad recently! A real bitter little piece of work most of the time. He's at constant war with the mods from AA , recently posted a thread on JSII calling them some seriously colourful names , shot his mouth off once too often and went and got himself banned from AA. :D
He knows Im keeping tabs on him still (i give him a little wave every now and then) but chooses to pretend I'm not there. However he's been very quiet on the "games wot I wrote" front , Infact not a squeak out of him since. But the day that changes, and he goes back to his naughty old ways, I'll be confronting him Elite Viper Squad style in front of all his chums about the ST games he DIDN'T write. Might be fun.. :)
By the way...Another author of one of the ST games he claimed has turned up in person..
http://www.atari.st/view.php?id=2471
Can't believe he nicked a game from a girl .... thats just looooooooooow :D
Anyway rambling aside I think there was a few 16k tape magazines with it and I hacked one of the free games off it (badly). It was called Sunglasses Sam goes Skiing, with a little tweaking it soon became Mad Dave goes Snowboarding. I told a few of my friends that were still interested in that kind of thing that I'd written it from scratch.
............and I'd do it again ahahahaha!!!
It bothers me that he is STILL listed as author of the games he's been proven not to have written. Anyone reading the comments will know better but why is he even listed as author?
Write games in C using Z88DK and SP1
Got a good deal though..
*typed
another mate reckoned he could make games on his C64, never saw none of them, another liar.
being a kid was like living is stalin's russia, 'dont trust no one' (of course none of my mates ever dissapeard for airing their political views)
Needless to say I pushed him over before assembly and encouraged everyone to throw their school bags on top of him until he was well and truly 'bagged' as we used to call it.
I'm not so sure. Maggot and Hot-Shot are both on my TTFn site and, although they have an inevitable resemblance, both being centipede-games, the graphics, gameplay and effects are quite different.
I notice that, although there are several programs credited to Jason Charlesworth in YC, both Maggot and Toolkit (Apr'84) are credited to John Charlesworth. I don't know if they are really different people or if it's just that YC got the name wrong. The Maggot code just credits J. Charlesworth, and I don't have the Apr'84 issue to check Toolkit.
My "Jason Grimblood's Hall of Mystery" page details several instances of "passing off", but after asking around I decided that it was a bit mean and I took it down, although I still have it here at home. A similar wheeze was for people to get their own work published as "original" in multiple publications, so they got paid more than once for the same program.
I'd agree about Galactoids (author's title Invaders) and Cosmic Chaos. The Holdstocks seem to have put some work into enhancing the game, so maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if they'd mentioned Gavin Smyth, but in the scrolly they give themselves total credit for everything.
Ooh, fancy that. I've got that one on Demotopia under Hamill and Crawford's names, and they get their own author profile pages for it too. I feel all dirty now.
Also on the demoscene, Craig Eades aka Tinbin Hacker was apparently notorious in the early 90s for ripping off other people's demos and replacing the graphics and text with his own (or just the text if hacking the graphics was too difficult), and was awarded something like 'Lamer Of The Year' in Judgment Day 3 demo in recognition of his work. Bit of a shame he constituted about half of the UK scene at the time...
There was a program called Ground Attack by Sandy MacLennan in the 13.Sep'83 issue of Home Computing Weekly. Unfortunately I don't have the HCW issue to compare with the Aug'84 Your Spectrum listing.
It would be particularly blatant to not only pinch someone's code but keep the same program title as well, but that also happened with Haunted House, originally published in C&VG Aug'83 and then in Sinclair User Mar'84 - and Time Switch (YC Aug'83 & SP Feb'84) - and Bridge Builder (YC Dec'83 & SP Sep'84).
Don't be fooled by a few superficial changes, it's quite easy to change the odd item here and there to make a game appear different. Apart from the ability to move further up the screen and the autofire, Hot Shot's gameplay is identical to Maggot's.
The clincher is in the way these games use their UDG graphics. In both games "A" is used for the centipede segments, and "B" for the mushrooms/obstacles littering the playfield. "D" is used for the player's missiles, "E" for the player's gun base. "F" and "G" combine to form the snail/rocket that traverses the screen periodically, and "H" and "I" make up the spider/alien which zig-zags across the bottom third of the screen.
Most interestingly of all, Maggot has UDG "C" defined as an alien which doesn't actually appear in the game. In Hot Shot UDG "C" is undefined. Why would Hot Shot skip UDG "C" if it was written from scratch?
Egghead Website
Arcade Game Designer
My itch.io page