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Comment by Lightkey | Hacker News Reader

I remember there being legal threads from LucasArts every few years, presumably when new staff at legal got aware of ScummVM. The ScummVM team got used to it but iMUSE was the only part that could actually get them into trouble because it was still patented back in the early days. Nice to see that Nick Porcino is acknowledging the unofficial implementations in the references, including ScummVM and its now-defunct sister project ResidualVM.

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The team working on ScummVM has provided a great historical resource to all of us. I have no exposure at all to interactions with ScummVM you mention, so won't speculate on that.

Hopefully the patent served more in creating a safe space for musical proceduralism in games rather than being chilling. As mentioned in this thread there has been brilliant proceduralism in so many games since Monkey 2.

I figured it was high time to highlight the innovations in iMuse because I realized in discussions that the core principles weren't well known, and difficult to extract from public sources like the patent unless you are really fluent with that language.

Patent is from 1994, and would have expired in 2014.

USPTO says 2011 on their site.

ResidualVM was merged backed into ScummVM as ScummVM picked up other 2.5D/3D engines beyond GRIME. Defunct makes it sound like it failed, but it succeeded well enough for ScummVM to own it more directly internally rather than as a sort of fork.

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