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.
