Atari v. Germans who don't like Alone in the Dark: the follow-up
To clarify the situation with Atari's legal threats in response to 4Players' review of Alone in the Dark, I spoke with 4Players editor-in-chief, Jörg Luibl. I also attempted to contact Atari but have yet to hear back from them.
It seems as if there isn't, in fact, a lawsuit so much as a toothless legal threat. It also seems as if 4Players was able to purchase a copy of the game on June 16th, four days in advance of the official June 20th release date. They were apparently in no way exceptional, and the street date was routinely broken throughout Germany. In which case, Atari's beef should be with retailers. As for Atari pulling advertising in response to 4Players' lukewarm preview, Luibl said he's accustomed to publishers doing that sort of thing.
I still disagree with Luibl's assertion that Atari is "against freedom of the press". It's pretty silly to extrapolate from a company's legal machinations some sort of higher political motive. But it does sound like 4Players is pretty much beyond reproach, and someone in Atari's legal department is awfully embarrassed right about now.
For more details, you can read my Q&A with Luibl after the jump.
Tom Chick: Is there an actual lawsuit filed against 4Players, or did you simply receive a threat of a lawsuit (for example, a cease-and-desist letter)?
Jörg Luibl: We received a fax with a threat of a lawsuit, more precisely: an action for an injunction about an amount in dispute of 50.000 Euro. [It said] we should remove our review at 2 pm.
TC: Have you been in contact with Atari since they asked you to pull the AITD review? If so, why not? And if so, what has happened since?
JL: After our review, we received no mail, no call, just the fax. One week before the official release we asked Atari via E-Mail, when we can anticipate the review copy. They did not answer, so we bought all versions.
TC: You claim to have purchased the game from a retailer who broke the street date. It seems like this would be easy enough to prove (for example, scan the receipt or post a picture of the retail box). Is this something 4Players has done to refute accusation that you reviewed a preview build or a pirated copy?
JL: We have the receipt. And we never use preview copies for a review. It's amazingly naive that a publisher apparently can not imagine, that a retail copy is available a few days before the official release: Even private persons could get hands on a copy in Germany on Monday!
TC: Since you purchased the game from a retailer who had essentially "broken the rules", did you or your staff have any misgivings about using that to review the game early? In other words, was there any potential ethical dilemma at 4Players about reviewing a game obtained by illegitimate means, even if the illegitimate means were no fault of your own?
JL: We have no ethical dilemma: We bought the game, we reviewed the game. Nobody broke any rules, there was no NDA for us. The retailer is a distributor who has nearly every game in stock a few days before the official release – so we got the official copy on Monday, 16th of June. Some of our German press colleagues received the official versions even on Friday, 13th of June! Atari did not send us the review copy because of our unsatisfying preview, so we had to prepare ourselves.
TC: You claim that Atari pulled advertising in response to a preview that was written of AITD. Did Atari officially connect pulling the advertising with the content of the preview? Or is this connection inferred from the timing?
JL: I can just refer to the information of our marketing: There was a booked advertising campaign for Alone in the Dark in April, which should start in the end of May. But when our preview went online on 20th of May, it was canceled. But we are used to these sanctions and this is not the reason for us to get excited. We are pissed off, because they want to suppress our freedom of speech as games magazine. We will not back down, just because Atari lose their nerves in the face of the missing quality of Alone in the Dark.
Link: http://fidgit.com/archives/2008/06/atari-v-germans-who-dont-like.php
Atari is not suing over Alone in the Dark review
Last week, rumors of a lawsuit over an Alone in the Dark review filed by Atari against German website 4Players.de found their way to a number of news sites such as this. However, today Atari has debunked the gossip in a response to SPOnG.com's earlier inquiries into the matter.
An company representative has stated, "Atari is not and will not be taking legal action of any kind against anyone relating to the reviews of Alone In The Dark. We are happy to clarify the situation in response to current inaccurate and misleading speculation."
All this talk of legal action started when 4Players.de posted an editorial last Thursday saying they had received a fax from Atari's lawyers telling the site that by running a review before the embargo set to end that Friday, they were "breaking the law and violate the rights of [Atari's] client."
The 4Player website, roughly translated by Google, confirms the conflict has been resolved peaceably:
"The dispute between 4Players.de and Atari was settled today. In a personal conversation between the two parties, Atari Germany's accusations against 4Players.de in all respects withdrawn. In addition, the legal action against 4Players.de. Thus, the differences in the case of Alone in the Dark overcome by mutual agreement. Atari and 4Players.de looking forward to the future cooperation."
Link: http://www.neoseeker.com/news/8284-atari-is-not-suing-over-alone-in...
Tainted Tie-Ins — Worst Movie Games Ever
Ever since they first fooled around in the Atari era, movies and videogames have had a troubled relationship.
Movies based on games -- like Super Mario Bros. and Postal-- deliver pure cinematic dreck, yet somehow games based on movies up the crap ante. Slapped together on tight development schedules by B-list teams, movie tie-in games rarely crawl out of the hole of mediocrity. Quite frankly, they dream of being mediocre.
Adding insult to injury, they sell enormously well. The NPD Group reported in June that the PlayStation 2 Iron Man game was May's seventh best-selling U.S. game.
Here's our list of the 10 worst movie-to-game translations in history, with input from a Wired.com reader poll. If it seems heavy on retro games, just remember that things used to be a lot worse.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Star Wars (Namco version)
Back to the Future
Nausicaä Kiki Ippatsu
Friday the 13th
Seven Samurai 20XX
Total Recall
Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game
Enter the Matrix
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Link: http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/multimedia/2008/07/galler...
Atari's Howard Scott Warshaw to guest star on Code Monkeys this Sunday!
Fire up the Tivo's for this one!
Link: http://www.digitpress.com/forum/showthread.php?s=7ab8b5ec97084a42fc...
Would You Buy An Atari Phone?
Well, would you? Seriously. Reason we're asking is that last week Atari sought to have their name trademarked in association with “internet protocol phones” and “residential telephone apparatus composing telephones and telephone connecting units”. Before you ask, yes, that's the gaming Atari doing the trademarking, not some random, other Atari. This would be the part where we try and find a good reason the company would be bothering with this, but really, there's little salvation to be found amongst the thought of an Atari phone.
Link: http://kotaku.com/5022161/would-you-buy-an-atari-phone
new Falcon game from .tSCc.
Finally after more than 3 years, I released my game Grenzueberschreitung at the NAS:
Grenzueberschreitung (engl.: crossing the border) is the first ever released game written in lua for the ATARI. It\'s also the first game ever that uses 2 Teamtaps to allow 8 players to participate on the falcon. The game itself is a tron clone for 8 players. The game was released 2005 at the Outline, and after rewrite it 2-3 times so finally this is the Version 1.0. Thanks to all people who helped me: DaFreak / Liquied Sky Records (for an finally unused cover, which was used more than a year at competitions), 505 for the music, Samurai / Inter for the final cover, Reservoir goods for the GodLib, lua.org for lua, Bitmaster for the mod player, Christos for beta testing, and all the players who participated in the last years in Grenzueberschreitungs competitions and give a lot of feedback.
Link: http://www.npoi.de/download.php?view.4
From: http://www.atari.org/
Vintagenarios Party 2008
Vintagenarios Party its old ATARI Party events mutate to multisystem Retro in Spain.
For 8/16/32 bits ... Computer or Console. From Oric-1, Amstrad, MSX to ST, Falcon, Amiga, Arquimedes... Megadrive, SNES to PSX.
FREE ENTRANCE!
BIG RETRO FEELING!
Link: http://www.vintagenarios.tk/ (Spanish, I think)
From: http://www.atari.org/
NAS2008 is finished - photos, results & releases
Yet another NAS has passed and all of us who attended had a great time. This year we had 8 player games going, Jaguar gaming, a Coldfire experiement board booting up a patched TOS, standard ST, MegaSTe and Falcons as well as accelerated models, and more.
PHOTOS: Photo gallery with pics by GokMasE from NAS2008 can be viewed here:http://www.ataricq.org/pictures/2008-06-27/thumb.html
This years event was a pretty productive one, with some software and stuff being finished:
GFX: Bear used a Tabby on his Falcon to produce a nice piece of gfx for NAS2008:http://www.sak.nu/cutenews/data/upimages/NAS08.png
GAMES:
PeP released preview of "PeNES", his experimental NES emulator for 060-equipped machines. It's based on a heavily modified version of NESCore, a nice open source NES emulation library. PeP says: "Don't ask me where to find NES ROMs etc. I have no idea." http://hem.passagen.se/shoggoth/penes/penes-0.0.1a.tar.gz
kRadD released his new multiplayer game for 8 players, Grenzüberschreitung.http://www.npoi.de/download.php?view.4
GAMING:
kRadD arranged a STOT competition for Kick Off 2, Speedball 2 and Grenzüberschreitung v1.0. http://www.npoi.de/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.32 http://www.npoi.de/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.33 http://www.npoi.de/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.34
DEMO:
STOS Bestens karma - the one and only demo that was made at NAS! A beta version of the demo was shown, and it contained music-synchronized text. The music was made by J in Triplex and the STOS-code was made by Kl0tt. An official version will be released later.
OTHER:
AtarICQ goes freeware. The most noticeable change with the AtarICQ 0.173 release is indeed in the change of the program license - it has now become freeware. The application is by no means discontinued, the change just reflects the fact that the program now no longer has any restrictions or naggings. In fact, the registration process has been completely removed. Some other small tweaks and fixes were also added, like for example the new feature that aICQ will now recall which TABs were open during the last session. http://www.ataricq.org/ataricq/
Litchi-patches. Since Rajah was kind enough to supply GFA sources, GokMasE took the opportunity to tweak some stuff in the prog, most noticebly the possibility to drag files from the remote window to desktop directory windows was added. http://topp.atari-users.net/litchgok1.zip (needs original archive at http://rajah.atari.org)
Thanks all who attended and made this years event a nice weekend! :)
See you all next year.Regards,Swedish Atari Club
Link: http://www.sak.nu/
From: http://www.atari-users.net/
D-Bug back with new game fix
CJ / D-Bug writes: We've been a while, but here is Epic (ST/STe/MSTe/TT/F030/HD) Some notes for this for Falcon users - the game will randomly lock up if you use the mouse or the joystick, so please use the keyboard. Sorry for this, but after many hours in the code, I decided to boot it out the door 'as is' and maybe return to it later. All other Atari owners, just play as usual with your input device of choice. (CJ recommends a PeST with a Microsoft Optical Mouse)
Download the fixed Epic (Updated archive!) http://files.dhs.nu/files_game/epicv2.zip
Visit the D-Bug site http://www.dbug-automation.co.uk/
From: http://www.dhs.nu/
Bits back on the ST
After some releases on other platforms, Bits have returned to the ST. You know the deal, minimalistic sound, and graphics. The effect this time is the well known "unlimited sprites".
Download Bits #56 "Unlimited blobs" http://files.dhs.nu/files_demo/bits56.zip
At Pouet.Net http://pouet.net/prod.php?which=50882
From: http://www.dhs.nu/
