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Atari is Copyright-Bullying the Creator of TxK and Tempest 2000 Because TxK is "Too Similar" to Tempest 2000. Huh??

Posted by Jessica Fisher on March 18th, 2015

Update - 3/18: Gamasutra reached out to Atari for comment, and the response isn't exactly reassuring. The company is basically citing reviews that liken TxK to Tempest as proof that the two games are too similar, and insists that they have been trying to reach an amicable solution with Llamasoft (Jeff Minter) from the beginning. A claim that he wholeheartedly disagrees with. A .PDF of one of Atari's lawyers' letters has been shared by Llamasoft, and it paints picture that's somewhat different from the official commentary.

TxK, created by Jeff Minter and Llamasoft (GoatUp, Caverns of Minos, Minotron 2112), is an action shooter that's kind of the spiritual successor to Minter's previous game, Tempest 2000, which was published by Atari in 1994. Recently, Atari has set their lawyers upon Minter in an effort to shut down TxK and any other titles that might be related to Tempest 2000.

Minter has posted an explanation of the situation on Llamasoft's discussion boards that detail Atari's accusations of theft by Minter of source code, music, and the concept of "jumping" of all things.

Jeff Minter: "... in order to create TxK I must have had access to, and stolen secrets from, Atari's source code, in order to steal the work of the other people who worked on Tempest 2000. (I *wrote* the source code for Tempest 2000, and didn't need to refer to it at all to create TxK, even if I still had it. The only other people who worked on the game were Joby Woods who did bitmaps (TxK has no bitmaps apart from one 64x64 graduated dot) and the Imagitec musicians (TxK has neither a modplayer nor any of Imagitec's music). So I stole my own work out of my own brain I guess.

"The soundtrack to TxK sounds identical to the soundtrack of Tempest 2000. (In fact the TxK soundtrack is entirely original and highly acclaimed; it won a Develop award and went to #1 on Bandcamp).

The player ship can jump. Apparently Atari owns jumping."

While most of the allegations could be argued, Atari has created a legal situation that will be astronomically expensive to contest. They are using their significant size and wealth to force the smaller company and developer into submission, basically. Atari also changed the original name of Tempest 2000 to Tempest X (along with just enough of the content) when porting the game to the PlayStation in order to cut Minter off from any royalties he might have earned through sales.

According to Minter, "...they are still trying to insist that I remove from sale Vita TxK (even though it's plainly at the end of its run now and only brings in a trickle these days) and sign papers basically saying I can never make a Tempest style game ever again. So no chance of releasing the ports."

Say goodbye to all those Tempest spin-off dreams. Atari is laying down the law with a fist made of money.

Apple Faces Class Action Lawsuit for iOS 8 Storage Hogging

Posted by Jessica Fisher on January 5th, 2015

It seems that Apple users are unsatisfied by Apples lack of information about how much storage the iOS 8 operating system takes up. The Huffington Post noted that on Tuesday, December 30th, Apple was slapped with a class-action lawsuit by its users. iOS 8 takes 1.1 GB of space and it needs 5.8 GB to install wirelessly, so people with 8 GB and 16 GB devices end up losing about 23% of their storage space just to the system. In order to combat the quickly filled storage space users will have to buy extra space through iCloud, netting Apple a tidy profit.

According to the lawsuit:

"Using these sharp business tactics, Defendant gives less storage capacity than advertised, only to offer to sell that capacity in a desperate moment, e.g., when a consumer is trying to record or take photos at a child or grandchild’s recital, basketball game or wedding. To put this in context, each gigabyte of storage Apple shortchanges its customers amounts to approximately 400-500 high resolution photographs."

You can read over the lawsuit posted by appleinsider here.