Copyright Question

[+sgrddy]

Greetings all. I picked up a cart of Pac-Man Collection for the 7800 - totally awesome by the way. I am curious however about this and other small run titles (Total Carnage, IS 2 for Jaguar, etc; Galaxian for Atari ST) - are these games actually licensed for publication? It says of the back of the manual, "Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man and characters are trademarks of Bally Midway Mfg. Co., sublicensed to Atari Corp. by Namco-America Inc." But certainly this game was not published by Atari, and even if it was, would not the license have expired by now? How does this work exactly?

[gdement]

Due to the bureaucracy of larger companies, these releases are too small to be worth the IP holders' time working out formal licensing. There might also be legal complexities they have to deal with that prevents them from being flexible. I think there's been cases of old games being formally licensed for a homebrew release, but that's rare. Usually the programmer just goes ahead and hopes for the best.

Edited September 22, 2009 by gdement

[8th lutz]

Total Carnage for the Atari Jaguar was a prototype and was finished by Songbird. Songbird was given the okay to complete and sell the game by Midway.

 

I know the homebrew author of Pac-man Collection e-mail Namco about getting the okay to release the game. Namco didn't respond at the time.