Scrabulous - an unofficial, online version of Scrabble – launched in 2007 on the social networking site Facebook had over 1,000,000 monthly users. The owners with the rights to the game in the U.S. and Canada, Hasbro, filed suit in federal court in New York City against Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla, the Calcutta-based brothers who created Scrabulous. Mattel, which owns the Scrabble rights in the rest of the world, had earlier issued cease-and-desist letters to the Agarwalla brothers, but they ignored them. Facebook has now taken the application off of Facebook in North America
A new application has been started on Facebook – Save Scrabulous! Reportably with more than 10,000 signatures. The Agarwalla brothers have fought back and introduced a new word game called ‘Wordscraper’ in January, which is already gaining popularity from Facebook users.
The question is was this a sensible business decision from Hasbro? Missing the opportunity to capitalize on Scrabulous’s success in the Social Networking world, which all businesses want to embrace, and allienating Scrabulous fans.
What do you think?
Will you miss Scrabulous?
Babel is pleased to announce the appointment of Lewis Glover as Director of QA, overseeing Babel’s expanding QA teams in Montreal, New Delhi and Brighton. Babel has over 400 QA testers delivering functionality, localisation and compliance QA, as well as separate Quality Standards, Evaluation and Training teams.
Lewis has previously been at Jagex where he managed QA of their MMO titles, and Atari Europe where he was Quality Director looking after all their European SKUs and was instrumental in the definition of outsourcing processes and migration to an offshore testing model. Lewis will be based in Babel’s Montreal facility, and will also be part of Babel’s new MMO task force.
Babel provides a global delivery capability via its facilities in Montreal, Brighton and New Delhi. Using its three time zones, a QA team of over 400 testers and a localisation department that is currently translating over 1 million words per month, the company is able to offer maximum scale when needed for time-critical launch titles. Babel is a Microsoft approved Xbox 360®test house in Europe and North America, an Approved QAAP test house for SCEA, and a partner with Nintendo.
About Babel Media
Babel is the industry leader in specialist outsourced services for the games and interactive entertainment industry. The company has offices in Brighton, Los Angeles, Montreal and New Delhi, providing comprehensive games-focused localisation, QA, certification, audio, print and services. Clients include SCEA, SCEE, SCEJ, SEGA, Nintendo, Microsoft, THQ, Atari, Ubisoft, Eidos, Capcom, Nokia, Activision – Blizzard, Namco Bandai, Konami, Majesco, NCSoft, Take 2, Square Enix, Rising Star, Hudson, EA, TT Games, Bethesda Softworks, Warner Brothers, Aspyr and LucasArts.
Two of the pioneers of the UK video games industry have been recognised in the Queen’s Birthday Honours.
David and Richard Darling, co-founders of game developers Codemasters, were both made Commanders of the Order of the British Empire (CBE).
They built up their company from a bedroom enterprise into one of the best known games developers in the world.
The firm is behind well established titles including the Colin McRae Rally series and Sensible Soccer.
More recently the firm has ventured into online games, releasing Lord of the Rings Online.
“For over 20 years David and Richard led Codemasters as it became one of the video game industry’s great British success stories,” said Rod Cousens, present head of Codemasters.
“Their drive and passion for creating the best in interactive entertainment will always be part of the industry’s heritage and this recognition is well deserved.”
The brothers sold their stake in the company in 2007 after 21 years at the firm.
Brilliant games
The two brothers started their first company - Galactic Software - in 1982, followed by a stint writing for Mastertronic, a publisher of low-cost computer software.
In 1986 they set up Codemasters, along with their father Jim. Their first title was BMX simulator, released in the company’s founding year.
There followed a series of simulator titles including jet ski, flight and even fruit machine games.
Many of these were written for the computer of the moment - the ZX spectrum - although they also produced titles for the BBC Micro, Acorn Electron and Amstrad CPC.
The brothers were famous for putting ringing endorsements of their games on the packaging.
“Dizzy’s Treasure Island is brilliant - it’s like a real cartoon but with amazing gameplay,” read one.
These were usually quotes from the creators of the game or the Darling brothers themselves. The Treasure Island quote was by David Darling, for example. Practices like this drew equal measures of mirth and criticism from the games press of the time.
But the company gained even greater notoriety when it developed a series of unlicensed games for Nintendo’s Entertainment System.
The titles, published by controversial company Camerica, bypassed the console’s so-called “lock-out chip”, designed to prevent unofficial products being played.
Titles included the Quattro Series, Ultimate Stuntman and the best-selling Micro Machines.
The company has continued to grow and now produces games for all three major consoles, PCs, handheld devices and mobile phones.
In 2005 the company was crowned the world’s leading independently owned video games developer by Develop Magazine.
The brothers left two years later to work on other projects.
They were honoured for their “services to the computer games industry”.
Source: BBC
Tetris is one of the few games that achieves ultimate popularity. It is remarkably simple, yet remarkably difficult. It’s been ported to every computer and game console known to man, and has sold millions of cartridges, tapes, and disks across the land.
Besides that, it also led to one of the most interesting legal battles in the history of video games, leading to the famed Tengen version of Tetris and to the downfall of a few companies. It’s a pretty cool story, so let’s get down to business. Hold on for a second while I set the time machine to cruise control..
June 1985
Inspired by a pentominoes game he had bought earlier, Alexey Pazhitnov creates Tetris on an Electronica 60 at the Moscow Academy of Science’s Computer Center. It is ported to the IBM PC by Vadim Gerasimov and starts spreading around Moscow. Pazhitnov gets a small degree of fame for his program.
July 1986
The PC version makes its way to Budapest, Hungary, where it is ported to the Apple II and Commodore 64 by Hungarian programmers. These versions catch the eye of Robert Stein, president of the British software house Andromeda. He plans to get the rights to the PC version from Pazhitnov directly, and to get the other versions from the Hungarian programmers. Even before Stein gets in touch with Pazhitnov or the Academy, he sells all the rights to Tetris (except for arcade and handheld versions) to Mirrorsoft UK and its USA affiliate, Spectrum Holobyte, owned by Robert Maxwell’s Pergamon Foundation.
November 1986
Stein wires a contract for the rights to Tetris to the Academy. Although Pazhitnov would later say that he did not mean to give a firm go-ahead to the deal, Stein goes ahead and flies to Moscow to sign the contract. He returns empty-handed; the Russians made up for their lack of knowledge of the video game world with obstinance. Stein makes a plan to essentially steal Tetris, to claim it was invented by the Hungarian programmers.
Meanwhile, the IBM PC version of Tetris is released by Spectrum Holobyte and Mirrorsoft, causing an instant sensation not only as an obscenely addictive game, but also as “the first game from behind the iron curtain”. The game is filled with graphics of Russian themes (battles, Matthias Rust landing his Cessna on Red Square, Yuri Gagarin’s first space mission). Stein still does not legally own any rights to Tetris.
June 1987
Stein presses for and finally gets a license giving him the rights to make Tetris for the IBM PC and compatibles “and any other computer system”. Now he owns the copyrights to Tetris, but he still doesn’t have a contract with the Russians.
January 1988
Tetris is released for all home computers. It gets glowing reviews and sells quickly in computer stores. Stein’s plan to “steal” the rights to Tetris is foiled when the CBS Evening News interviews Pazhitnov as the inventor of the game. A new company, ELORG (Electronorgtechinca), takes over the negotiations with Stein.
ELORG’s director, Alexander Alexinko, realizes that Stein is giving out rights he doesn’t have and threatens to cut off any deal. Stein, in turn, threatens to start an international situation.
May 1988
After months of bickering, Stein signs a contract with ELORG to make Tetris for computers. The contract expressly forbids rights to arcade and handheld versions, and any other mediums “which we did not dream about yet”. Meanwhile, Tetris has become the top-selling computer game in England and the United States.
July 1988
Stein meets with Alexinko in Paris to work out arcade rights to Tetris. Alexinko has quite a different agenda; he hasn’t seen any money from Stein at all yet. Meanwhile, Spectrum and Mirrorsoft are sub-licensing their rights. Spectrum gives Bullet-Proof Software the rights to make Tetris video and computer games in Japan; at the same time, Mirrorsoft gives Atari Games the exact same rights in Japan and North America. The two companies start infighting.
Robert Maxwell, owner of both Mirrorsoft and Spectrum, sides with Mirrorsoft on the matter. Atari starts plans to release an arcade and NES game (under the Tengen label). Bullet-Proof Software still has the computer rights in Japan; BPS president Henk Rogers successfully gets the rights to release a video-game version later in the year. Tetris is released for the Famicom in early November 1988; eventually, two million cartridges would be sold.
November 1988
The Game Boy is undergoing development. Nintendo of America head Minoru Arakawa wants to make Tetris the pack-in game; he enlists Henk Rogers to get the handheld rights to Tetris for him. Rogers contacts Stein but basically gets stonewalled by him, so Rogers decides to fly to Moscow to get the rights himself. Stein, sensing why Rogers asked for the rights, flies to Moscow as well. Robert Maxwell’s son, Kevin, also decides to fly to Moscow to straighten out what is by now a large-scale licensing mess. The three men fly into Moscow at the exact same time.
February 21, 1989
Rogers gets to ELORG representative Evgeni Belikov first. He impresses Alexey Pazhitnov and the Russians, and signs a contract for the handheld rights to Tetris. Afterward, Rogers shows off the Famicom version of Tetris to the Russians. Belikov is shocked. He didn’t give Rogers the rights to make a console version! Rogers explains that he got the rights from Tengen; Belikov has never heard of Tengen! Rogers, trying to appease the Russians, tells Belikov the part of the story Stein did not tell him, and writes him a check for royalties on the Tetris cartridges he has already sold, with promises of more checks. He sees that he has a chance to get all the console rights to Tetris, but knows that the much larger Atari will fight him. Fortunately, he has Nintendo on his side!
A reminder: Robert Stein’s original agreement was only for computer versions of Tetris. Any other rights he gave out weren’t his to sell.
Later, Stein makes it to ELORG. Belikov makes him sign an alteration to the original contract defining computers as “PC computers which consist of a processor, monitor, disk drive(s), keyboard and operation system”. Stein misses this line defining computers; he later realizes that it was all a big orchestration on Rogers’ part to get his rights from Stein. The next day, he is told that, although he can’t get the handheld rights at the moment, he can get the arcade-game rights. He signs the contract for them three days later.
February 22, 1989
Kevin Maxwell visits ELORG. Belikov takes out Rogers’ Famicom Tetris cart and asks him about it. Maxwell was unaware that his own company gave some rights to Atari Games until he reads Mirrorsoft’s name on the cartridge. Maxwell asserts that the cart is a pirated copy, and returns to his agenda of getting the arcade and handheld Tetris rights. He leaves with only the right to bid on any rights remaining on Tetris.
The final scorecard: Kevin Maxwell walks off with a piece of paper, Robert Stein with the arcade rights, and ELORG with conclusive evidence, thanks to Maxwell’s assertion that any Famicom carts are pirates, that it never sold the video game rights. If Maxwell wanted those rights it would have to outbid Nintendo. Henk Rogers has the handheld rights and tells Arakawa at NOA that the console rights are up for grabs. BPS makes a deal to let Nintendo make Tetris for Game Boy; a deal that was ultimately worth between $5 and 10 million to BPS.
March 15, 1989
Henk Rogers returns to Moscow and makes a gigantic offer for the console rights to Tetris on behalf of Nintendo - an offer that, although undisclosed, was high enough that Mirrorsoft did not try to match it. Arakawa and NOA chief executive officer Howard Lincoln fly to the USSR.
March 22, 1989
A contract for the home videogame rights is finalized with Nintendo, which insists on a clause that the Russians would come to America to testify in the legal battle that would undoubtedly ensue after word of the contract comes out. The advance cash for ELORG is reported to be around $3 to 5 million. Belikov wires Mirrorsoft saying that neither it, Andromeda, or Tengen were authorized to distribute Tetris on video game systems, and that those rights are now given to Nintendo. The Nintendo and BPS executives have a party that night in their Moscow hotel room.
March 31, 1989
Howard Lincoln gleefully faxes Atari Games a cease-and-desist order to stop manufacturing any version of Tetris for the NES. Both Atari and Robert Maxwell become furious. Tengen responds to Nintendo on April 7th that they completely own the rights to home versions of Tetris.
April 13, 1989
Tengen files an application for a copyright of the “audiovisual work, the underlying computer code and the soundtrack” of Tetris for the NES. The application does not mention Alexey Pazhitnov or Nintendo’s rights to the game.
Robert Maxwell, meanwhile, is using his vast media empire to try to get Tetris back. He contacts both the Soviet and British governments to intervene on the Tetris matter. Infighting between the Communist party and ELORG begins, and Maxwell gets a promise from no less than Mikhail Gorbachev that he “should no longer worry about the Japanese company”.
In late April, Lincoln flies back to Moscow and learns of ELORG’s being put upon by the government. In the middle of the night, he receives a call from NOA that Tengen has sued Nintendo.
The next day, he starts interviewing Belikov, Pazhitnov, and many others at ELORG, to make sure that Nintendo’s case for the Tetris home rights is airtight. NOA immediately countersues Tengen, and evidence begins to be gathered.
May 17, 1989
Tengen releases their version of Tetris with a full-page ad in USA Today, despite the coming legal battle.
June 1989
The court case between Tengen and Nintendo begins.
The battle mostly hinged on one matter: Was the Nintendo Entertainment System a computer, under the definition in the contract that Belikov made Stein sign, or a video-game system? Atari argued that the NES was meant to be a computer, due to its expansion port and the existence of a computer network for the Famicom (short for “Family Computer”) in Japan. Nintendo’s argument was more to the point: the Russians at ELORG had never had the intention of selling the video game rights to Tetris; the definition of “computer” in Stein’s contract proved it.
June 15, 1989
A hearing is held about the injunctions Tengen and Nintendo had given each other to cease manufacture and sale of their respective versions of Tetris. Judge Fern Smith decides that neither Mirrorsoft nor Spectrum Holobyte had been granted the video game rights, so therefore it could not have legally given those rights to Tengen. Nintendo’s injunction request is granted.
June 21, 1989
Tengen’s version of Tetris is taken off the shelves, and manufacture of the Tengen version is ceased. Several hundred thousand copies of Tengen Tetris, sitting in their boxes, lie in a warehouse.
July 1989
Nintendo’s version of Tetris for the NES is released. About three million are sold in the US. At the same time, the Game Boy, with Tetris as the pack-in, is being sold. America gets Tetrisized.
This ends the main history of Tetris; the lawsuit between Nintendo and Atari would continue to drag on and on and on (it was finally finished up by 1993).
Epilogue
Atari Games still released an arcade version of Tetris, selling about twenty thousand units. Atari Games was recently bought up by Williams/WMS; the fate of the Tengen Tetris carts lying in warehouses is unknown. In all likelihood they were bulldozed since Tengen could not legally get rid of them any other way. If the figures are to be believed, there are about one hundred thousand Tengen Tetris cartridges floating around; a less-than-average run by NES standards, but still nowhere near an impossible cart to find.
Robert Stein made, in total, about $250,000 on Tetris. He could have made a great deal more, of course, but Stein had trouble getting Atari and Mirrorsoft to pay him royalties for the (bogus) rights he sold them. Spectrum Holobyte had to organize another deal with ELORG just to hold on to the computer rights to Tetris.
Robert Maxwell’s large-scale media organization collapsed in the midst of the struggle, and Robert Maxwell himself died suspiciously as questions rose about whether he was entirely honest about his business dealings. As a result, Mirrorsoft UK faded away as well.
The big winners of the whole affair were Henk Rogers, president of BPS, and Nintendo themselves. How much did Tetris make for Nintendo? That’s difficult to answer, considering that Tetris being the pack-in for the Game Boy enticed customers to buy the Game Boy.. and from there, buy other Game Boy carts. Bringing all this into account, the figure can go up and up and up. About 30 million Game Boy Tetris carts have been made.
As for the Russians, no one made big money from Tetris except for the Soviet government. As the USSR broke up, the people at ELORG and the Academy scattered across the country.
Alexey Pazhitnov made nearly no money from Tetris itself. ELORG made, then cancelled a deal that would have given him merchandising rights to Tetris. Still, Pazhitnov was happy that the game he created became famous world-wide, and he did get an 286-clone from the Academy as a reward; he also had a much nicer apartment than most of his colleagues. In 1996, with the financial backing of Henk Rogers, he organized The Tetris Company LLC, and is now finally getting royalties for his creation.
Source: www.atarihq.com
A British-designed computer game condemned for its extreme violence has been receiving rave reviews on www.reviewcentre.com
The latest release in the controversial Grand Theft Auto series has been recommended by 72 per cent of users on the UK’s leading consumer review website despite widespread criticism about the level of violence in the game.
The release of the game prompted a flurry of news reports nationwide as stories broke of shoppers being mugged and attacked by those desperate to get their hands on the long-awaited game but Paul Nadin, founder of www.reviewcentre.com , said reviewers are not complaining about the level of violence.
He added: “Grand Theft Auto has sold in excess of 70 million copies since the series was first launched in 1997, so it is obviously a hugely popular game with consumers.
“There has been a lot of press coverage talking about the high level of violence in the game and violence from those keen to get their own copy but our reviewers are more focused on discussing the game quality.
“The latest Grand Theft Auto has been praised for its ‘awesome graphics’, level of action and addictive storyline, which shows our reviewers are keen to review the game not the hysteria surrounding it.”
This fourth installment hasn’t been without criticism though as some reviewers are not happy with how the game has progressed.
Nadin added: “A number of consumers have complained the hype surrounding the game’s release is unfounded, suggesting the game play has not improved since previous games.
“One reviewer suggested the game is only good for a ‘first time experience’ and said the graphics are not justification enough for buying the game.
“It is good to see a cross-section of opinion from our users and also to see they are not influenced by the media but are keen to give an objective viewpoint to other gamers.”
Please note: This is not a uVme game. For uVme games click here…
MotorStorm is back and this time pitting bikes, buggies, big rigs, and monster trucks against each other on a chaotic island filled with lush vegetation and a plethora of deadly hazards.
With the game’s release set for sometime later this year, PSU.com thought we’d check in with the team at Evolution Studios for a quick update on the title courtesy of Creative Director, Paul Hollywood.
First and foremost, Hollywood described how the team acquired a better understanding of the PS3 during its development of the original MotorStorm, thus allowing them to use the machine to far greater potential, creating the more “intensive environments” seen in the sequel.
“We’ve started from scratch with a lot of this game. We learned a lot about the PS3 while making the first game.” he said. “This time we can use that knowledge to get more out of the hardware, and work more efficiently. So that allows us to produce the more intensive environments that you’ll see on the Island. It really is a whole world away from Monument Valley, where MotorStorm was set.”“But obviously we don’t want to just have the same game in a new place; that would be unfair to people who buy the new game,” Hollywood continued. “So we’ve gone back over pretty much all of the systems and cranked them up a notch or two. So we have a greater variety of vehicles, more tracks, better AI systems, a new game structure, better online capabilities – the works really.”
Philosophically, he said the idea behind MotorStorm was fundamentally to “entertain” the player, describing the game as being made deliberately more “Hollywood” than other racers on the market.
“When we created MotorStorm, we made a conscious decision to make it primarily to entertain. This might sound strange, but most racing games are there to provide a representation to the player of what that race might be like in real life. MotorStorm was different because it was made deliberately more Hollywood,” explained the appropriately-named Hollywood. “This meant that we allowed ourselves the freedom to concentrate the action around the player, to try to constantly give them something to look at other than just the track ahead. We’ve brought this thinking straight into the new game too. So, basically, the MotorStorm games are all about trying to give the player a good time, rather than allowing the player to have a good time by themselves.”
Finally, when asked on what will offer gamers that they haven’t already seen in other racers, Hollywood pointed to what he considers as the every “essence” of the franchise – brutal, chaotic racing.
“There’s always stuff going on, whether it’s a bike rider insulting a buggy, a rally car flipping over in front of you, or even a big rig ramming some other poor sap into a wall,” he said.
“We tried to make off-road racing cool again, and I guess from the number of new off-road racing games, we must have succeeded. But our games are not just about racing, they’re about racing in this messed up, physically demanding world in which everyone’s fighting and struggling for themselves. And it makes a great show for the player.”
Source: Justin Pinter - www.psu.com
Please note: This is not a uVme game. For uVme games click here…
The 2008 award for “Most Injuries to Gamers and People Around Them By a Video Game Controller” just has to be awarded to the Nintendo Wii Gaming Console!
Accident & Emergency Departments across Great Britain are treating Wii associated injuries ranging from bruising to back strain, especially in middle-aged parents. If you were wondering whether you are in that category the dictionary definition of middle aged is: “The period between youth and old age” - so that’s a lot of us!
This must have game has the British public off their sofas playing a whole range of physically demanding games. Before the Wii only fingers and thumbs were needed to control the action. With the Wii you need to check your surroundings, clear the area, follow the safety instructions and do plenty of stretching exercises to prepare for the action! Brandishing your controller, you swing it to mimic the actions of the tennis racket/golf club, etc., so you are interacting with the game environment as if you are physically there.
The Nintendo Wii is a revolutionary gaming system like no other video game console offers. Watch this space for games reviews. VERDICT: Absolutely hilarious and brilliant fun.
Please note: The Wii doesn’t currently support uVme games. For uVme games click here…
Grab the Wii Wheel and enter a new kind of race! The Wii Wheel brings in a new lease of life to Mario Kart Wii. Great for drifting around corners at high speed or performing tricks and wheelies. Mario Kart is back with vengeance!
As well as the usual Grand Prix, Time Trials and Battle Races, Mario Kart Wii has been injected with heaps of new features.
There is a total of 8 karts and bikes to choose from all varying in weight, acceleration, drift and speed. Each customised to the chosen driver’s characteristics. I particularly like Baby Mario’s Baby Booster!
With over 30 tracks ranging from the classics of SNES Mario Circuit 3 and N64 Bowser’s Castle to the wicked new tracks like Luigi Circuit and
As well as the Multiplayer Mode you can now race and battle against friends or other players from all around the world via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection!
An absolutely brilliant revamp of the old Mario Kart Classic!
Please note: This is not a uVme game. For uVme games click here…