Legal issues - Copyright holder of Lemmings

[ccexplore]

Hey yeah.  This reminds me about the recent fiasco about how Sony is getting sued for their rootkit/malware-like CD copy protection technique.  Looks like the Sony lawyers will have a lot to keep them busy.

[ccexplore]

Oh wait, that's the same lawsuit tseug was talking about.

[Sarendt]

Can you make your version of the game "work" with some other graphics, like squirrels or something, and provide an interface where users create and save their own images that will show up in the game?  It might be a fun idea, like Make Your Own Opoly?  I see lots of posts with individual interpretations about the look of a lemming... lots of variation there.  So, maybe everyone's idea of the look of a lemming is different?  Plus, people could just insert any images they happen to have laying around and it wouldn't be your responsibility what they choose.  No ideas about sounds, but I think it might be fun to make my own lems to use.

Plus, when a person registers a trademark or applies for one, they have to register with someone, like the US Patent office I think???  Is that a place to start?

[0xdeadbeef]

All graphics will all be in GIF format and can be easily exchanged.
Especially creating own graphics sets will be very easy as also the configuration files are plain text files.

However, for the lemmings, there is a lot of "special" treatment necessary to get everything to work like it should. In my first attempt I tried to make everything configurable as well, but it soon became clear that this would be a major effort. So I mean, you can exchange the e.g. digger graphics and even the digging mask, but some things like the animations frames where to dig etc. are "hard coded".