Who does Hasbro think they are!

Third news topic down: http://www.mvpsoft.com/latest_news.html

quote:

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Debris 32 No Longer Available September 25, 2000: MVP announced today that Debris 32, its award-winning classic arcade game, is no longer available for purchase or download from its site. Other web sites making the game available for download have been advised to discontinue doing so. In February 2000 Hasbro Interactive filed suit in Boston District Court against MVP and five other defendants alleging copyright infringement by Debris 32 and other games on several Hasbro titles. According to Dave Snyder, president of MVP Software, Hasbro's claim against Debris 32 was completely without merit, and we believe that Hasbro filed the suit with full knowledge that this is the case. After spending seven months litigating, however, we realized that although we would likely emerge victorious from the court room, the expense of litigation far exceeded the revenue the game would generate. Once Hasbro agreed to a settlement that in no way restricted our ability to create great games in the future, we decided that the only sensible thing to do was accede to their demand that Debris 32 be pulled from the market. Snyder continued, We regret that the game will no longer be available to MVP's fans and loyal customers, but settling with Hasbro was the only way to get back to the business of creating games and out of the courthouse.

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For those of you that don't know Debris 32 is a Asteroids clone, but only in the sense that you fly around and at times blow up some asteroids (the most basic principle of the original game release back in 1979). The rest of the game is completely dis-similar from the original Asteroids. This includes graphics, sounds, gameplay elements etc. Debris 32 has a mirad of different levels, with tons of different things to shoot, varying mission objectives, and some very cool "power up" features. How Hasbro continually gets away with this crap is beyond me, they've become the biggest copyright bully of the 21st century. [edited by - Xorcist on July 1, 2002 5:35:25 PM]