Hacker News Reader

Comment by TuxMark5 | Hacker News Reader

This doesn't feel right for me. OpenTTD is so much superior in every way compared to the original TTD, that noone in their right mind would ever play the original. So Atari now, while spending zero effort compared to the years of work that OpenTTD devs put in, will basically sell OpenTTD as if was their own creation. People who buy the new TTD will simply play OpenTTD anyway, since it's so much better.

I might be wrong, but it feels like Atari are like parasites in this situation feeding off the hard work of OpenTTD devs.

View on HN

The downsides of putting “TTD” in the name “OpenTTD” is a certain level of vulnerability to the original creator (or a rights inheritor) deciding it’s worth their time to care again someday. I suspect this will do more for the TTD community than it will harm it, though; any modern sale of TTD is targeted precisely at the folks who would take mortal offense at harm to OpenTTD, and $10 (which would have been merely $5 in 2000) is the opposite of egregious after 100% inflation pushed AAA games towards $90 these days. I paid $5 for a used copy of SimTower back then, I would happily pay the same today for TTD resources, so this is all fine.

I get that Atari isn’t perhaps as loved as, say, Bullfrog or Dynamix, but better that companies respect their properties and their fans with an outcome like this, than be another boringly-common community-destroying Nintendo Lawyer Takedown Club.

(It’s also now in line with the various WAD and Descent games over time that used this model, where the engine is maximum rewrite amazing but the game resources require a GOG purchase. The point of rewrites isn’t to deprive the games of revenue!)

The modern Atari has no relation to the original Atari. They’re essentially copyright trolls. I do not believe we owe them any moral obligation for the works they bought from the original Atari via a series of many intermediaries.

> It’s also now in line with the various WAD and Descent games over time that used this model, where the engine is maximum rewrite amazing but the game resources require a GOG purchase.

I don't know about Descent, but this hasn't been true wrt Doom for decades: https://freedoom.github.io/about.html

FreeDoom, like OpenTTD, walks a fine line between ‘artistic reimplementation’ and ‘legally vulnerable’ due precisely to reimplementing art assets, yes.

It's similar to Valve and Dota2. We all know what it means but officially, it isn't actually DotA and doesn't stand for anything. They will never refer to the game as Defense of the Ancients. Seems to have worked for them.

Worth noting that the Atari of today is a shell corporation that has precisely zero to do with the original.

IceFrog was on the Dota2 team, and valve owns the trademark

It's far more complicated than that and ended up in court. They own the commercial rights after a legal battle with Blizzard (and Riot was in the fray, somewhere), who retained some rights to the name. Valve's 'Dota' doesn't legally stand for anything because it'd be a direct reference to Warcraft 3 (Ancients), just as TTD can be said to not legally stand for Transport Tycoon Deluxe.

That's the entire point that you've simultaneously acknowledged and missed.

IceFrog didn't start DotA, either. He had no claim to the name.

TL;DR there's complicated history behind it and much money was spent arguing over it.

IIRCC, Eul, the guy who made Dota originally, also works at Valve.

It's also worth noting that the original TTD had nothing to do with the original Atari and a lot more to do with Microprose which was purchased by Hasbro Interactive, which was later purchased by Infogrames which renamed itself Atari after buying the remnants. Oh, and the "new" Microprose has even less to do with the old Microprose than the new Atari does with the old Atari (at least they own the rights to all the old Atari titles).

I can look at this from 2 additional perspectives:

- OpenTTD (a game I truly love and have followed since before the 0.3 days) was not born as a clean-room reimplementation of TTD. It started as a disassembly effort, something which is perhaps morally gray, especially if you take into account the original TTD was coded in assembly (with sprinkles of C). Perhaps this way there is some vague contribution that goes towards Chris Sawyer?

- This is a way you can legally get the original graphics of the game (GRF). Although I think the shareware version technically also worked...

Atari didn't put in the effort, but Chris Sawyer did. Now Atari paid Sawyer for the rights to the game. I do not think Atari is a parasite here just because they paid for the game instead of creating it.

It seems to me that the logical outcome of your interpretation is that Sawyer's leniency towards the OpenTTD devs would be punished by losing exclusivity to his IP. Essentially, you are asserting "squatter's rights" to IP - if IP rights are not enforced, then they lapse. This is an interesting idea in principle, but I'm concerned that it might have prevented OpenTTD from ever being created. Original creators would be incentivized to chase off derivative works to protect their IP.

My issue with this argument is that I'm not sure how much of OpenTTD is their IP. OpenTTD has been development for so long that I doubt that any original disassembly remnants remain in the latest version of OpenTTD. The only true piece of IP that OpenTTD may use is the name (the TTD part of OpenTTD) and the graphics, the latter of which being the more important one. However, as far as I know, OpenTTD devs have created their own version of all the assets that are also much higher resolution compared to the original. As a result, I see OpenTTD as an entirely separate game, that's been heavily inspired by original, but is its own separate entity.

If you take an essay, and rewrite every paragraph and also add some new words, then it's still plagiarism. Perhaps not under copyright law, but ethically. OpenTTD goes beyond "heavily inspired" because it is intended to reimplement the original game.

I am sympathetic to arguments of the form "It was abandonware," "Copyright lasts for too long anyways," etc. But I don't think you can claim OpenTTD owes nothing to the creators of TTD. OpenTTD was meant to replace TTD and would not exist without it.

It's not plagiarism when you openly credit the original.

Making a clone of a video game, even with some substantial changes, may not actually be legal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_Holding,_LLC_v._Xio_Int....

Also "TTD" is hardly a name you can claim. It's three letters that don't make a word.

As long as it officially stands for nothing, perhaps. See DotA vs Dota2.

KFC would like a word.

What "leniency"? It's not like OpenTTD contains any TTD IP

that would require some confirmation from a court

the standards for originality changed substantially twice in the timeframe we are talking about (recently, in 2023, the Supreme Court made it more strict, reversing a ruling from the 90s)

but still, what counts as sufficiently transformative is a very complicated question, especially when it comes to this kind of thematically identical but still creatively innovative derivative works

I remember how many years artists spent on the NewGRF packs, to make them high definition, what to add, what to keep, what to reimagine, and how! and of course the same goes for the game mechanics, the UI, the ... pathfinding, the economics (prices for freight, but also now there's a supply and demand system too, right?)

but the original behavior is still kept, so that's more clearly derivative (a copy), and in this case the new additions might be a new original work on their own, but still for OpenTTD to be able to be distributed without infringement of the original TTD it either needs to license that work for redistribution or remove the infringing parts.

(and of course it's a layman's analysis, so ...)

The Atari that may have paid for development no longer exists. This is a skin suit of a legal entity.

Before OpenTDD was ready, the improved signals and etc were originally part of "TTDPatch", which made the original 'model railroad' much more fun. So I stuck with that for a long time. They should at least ship the patch with the original game.

> Atari

> parasites

This is pretty typical for Atari... any software that ever graced their consoles magically becomes their IP, ripe for exploitation, even if they didn't write it...

> while spending zero effort

Why do you think it took such little effort? Is it simply utilizing an emulation/portability package like Proton?

I assume they will take the original and most likely unchanged TTD binaries and package them together with DOSBox and that's it. It's something that one dev could do in a weekend.

Yes, it is.

How do you feel about old Lucas arts adventure games that are purchasable on gog and other platforms and come bundled with scummvm?

I see no issue with it. The same way I see no issue selling old DOS games packaged with DOSBox. Neither ScummVM nor DOSBox are games themselves. In this case it's the content that matters.

However in OpenTTDs case, the entire implementation is original (including the new high res assets).

I would have 0 issues with this TTD/OpenTTD situation if OpenTTD was left on Steam as-is and TTD was a separate purchase that granted the original assets for use in OpenTTD.

unfortunately it's not that simple, especially as long as the original behavior is still in there

and ... successfully defending the originality of the reimplementation as a standalone work would be a risky and costly legal endeavor

(even though the standards for originality - "is it transformative enough?" was more lenient when OpenTTD was made than it's today)

>Scummvm

Scummvm could adapt OpenTTD for their own working in the exact same way as OpenTTD. They did that with Ultima.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com