Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!debri
From: debri@dds.nl (DEnnis Brinkhuis)
Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english
Subject: Stealing of an idea
Date: Tue, 5 Oct 1999 15:08:20 +0200
Organization: DEbri
Lines: 54
Message-ID: <1dz7idx.1txa004bsrd2eN@[194.171.204.57]>
NNTP-Posting-Host: 194.171.204.57
X-Newsreader: MacSOUP 2.3

I got some mails of people that noticed that somebody made a very
similar idea of a game we did. You will see that in on the page with
home-pages.

We made a game called DOWN. It was supposed to be called UP&DOWN and
that's also the way as we showed and explained it on our site. Our site
showed the complete oncept of both games (UP & DOWN).
Since UP was still a bit buggy and most people liked DOWN better, we cut
out UP for now so that it would be a finished game (for our first time).
The UP-code is still in our game, but temporary hidden.

Now this other guy (David?!?) made a game, exactly the same as our UP.
That can happen since the concept of our game is rather old. I heard
that there was a similar game on the Spectrum and I know the
Mac-versions of this game (NS-tower & NS-shaft).
I must say that it's really a coincident that he made this (type of)
game at the same time as we did, and even when we put it on our site
that we were working on this.
But again, this can happen..

But there are some things that I can't imagine that are coincidence.
Like:
Our game was called UP, this other person also called his game UP
We added a 4-player mode, this other guy also made a 4player mode.
The timing, I added the game to the Homepage-list, he was the next to
add his game to this list and he even wrote an almost identical text
with it.
The only thing what he did was release a 1.1 version, as if he ever
reeased a version 1. As if he was working on this before us.
The fact that we were working on these games have been on our site for
almost a year, I took the UP-part off when I put a link on the
Homepage-list. That is very recently.

I don't mind somebody elso doing a similar game, but this time I feel a
bit screwed. Using the same concept, the same name and some identical
new options. All at the same time, the least this peron could have done
was contacting us that he was working on a similar game.

I'm not happy about the fact that I put this in the Newsgroups, but I
tried to mail him without getting any reply. I would have prefered to
keep this "irritation" personal, but since I didn't got any reply, I put
it here.

I don't ask him to credit us or anything, just an explenation of how his
game can be this identical to ours...


Cheers,

DEnnis..

PS. I do have a back-up off our old site somewhere, so I can show that
his idea is identicall to ours!!