Game ports

[+mizapf]

I recently used MAME to fresh up some pre-TI memories - before I got the TI, I played on a Atari 2600 console of one of my friends. I know that the last game we played was Spiderman, and when I tried it now on MAME, I quickly remembered the gameplay. If I remember correctly, my friend kept his console for some more years, so I probably already had my TI-99/4A.

 

So I got some ROMs and among those, this one surprised me most: Dodge 'em. It looks very familiar, doesn't it? The surprise was that in recent times I used to think that Car Wars was an original TI game ... BUT ... I must have known better back in those days. The longer I think about it, the more am I certain that we played that on the 2600 already.

 

Many of those classic games are ports, obviously. I wonder if TI had to pay license fees, or whether the companies back in those days just ported the others' games. At least for Munch Man, there must have been some license trouble, when we consider the beta version that looks much closer to Pacman. On the other hand, TI Invaders is very similar to Space Invaders (and also much more sophisticated).

[TheMole]

11 hours ago, mizapf said:

The surprise was that in recent times I used to think that Car Wars was an original TI game ... BUT ... I must have known better back in those days.

Many of those classic games are ports, obviously. I wonder if TI had to pay license fees, or whether the companies back in those days just ported the others' games. 

 

Car Wars is a rip-off of the Sega arcade original Head On, back in the day companies played quite fast and loose with IP rights and got away with things that wouldn't be conceivable today. I think the general concensus was that as long as you don't use any trademarks it was fine...

 

I don't think TI themselves every paid any license fees for the "ports" they did, but companies like Atarisoft for instance definitely had licenses for the stuff they put out. I think TI just prefered to "draw inspiration" from others instead of paying for stuff...

[Retrospect]

Yeah TI made " Hustle " and that was a Sega / Gremlin arcade game originally.  They didn't even bother to rename that one.  

[digdugnate]

Blasto was also a Gremlin game. 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasto_(arcade_game)

[digdugnate]

Hopper, according to John Phillips, was a clone of Pengo:

 

Quote

"While I was working on Moon Mine, my wife was working in the documentation group for TI (she wrote part of the Moon Mine manual). There she met a man by the name of Mike Archuleta, who was a Supervisor in the QA group. We all went to a party together and she introduced me to Mike. Mike was brilliant and really wanted to do some programming. He came up with the idea of doing a game together, since he needed the technical guidance.
      We went out to an arcade and found a coin operated game called, "Pengo." It had a penguin who pushed big ice blocks around the screen. We liked the concept and decided to use it. Instead of a penguin, we chose a Kangaroo. Instead of ice blocks, we chose crates. We did a storyboard on the game and divided up the programming. We also chose the TI Mini Memory cartridge as our intended platform, since there were no quality games that would fit in the 3.5K of RAM it contained.
      We coded for weeks and spent several late, late nights cutting code and optimizing code to get it to fit into the Mini Memory [cartridge]. Eventually, we did. I remember calling my parents at 4:00am because I was so excited that we had finished it. We submitted to TI and they accepted it as a Class A submission. They liked the game so much, though, that they asked us to add more to it because they wanted to produce a standalone cartridge of the game. So, we added title screens, two players, more levels, a surprise level, etc. Hopper was produced and released just before TI announced they were killing the 99/4A and both Mike and I received royalty payments for about a year and a half."

 

https://www.videogamehouse.net/hopper.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pengo_(video_game)

[+FarmerPotato]

John Philips' story fits with an anecdote I heard.  Texas Instruments engineers would go to the arcade under the student center of Texas Tech University, to see what was "in". TTU had the  most impressive arcade in Lubbock.