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[Derek]

One of Tim's claims is that Edge is a rip-off of his game Bobby Bearing.  Of course, many people pointed out that Bobby Bearing is "inspired" heavily by Marble Madness.  Just wanted to point out that it's probably also inspired by Spindizzy.

Spindizzy:



Bobby Bearing:



If you read some reviews of Bobby Bearing from the 80's, a lot of them mention both Marble Madness and Spindizzy:

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/infoseek.cgi?regexp=Bobby+Bearing

[Oddbob]

Yeah, I posted a link to the Crash review in the comments section on Offworld but it got eaten by the Commentbeast.

Probably pretty meaningless to USA'ians given the Commodore slant but the whole isometric thing was a bit of a fad for a while over here after Ultimate/ACG/Rare whatever you want to call them punted out Knight Lore for the Speccy. 1986 especially (the year Bobby Bearing came out) was filled with bandwagon jumping attempts with the odd gem (Batman, Head Over Heels) inbetween.

Original is something Bobby Bearing most certainly is not and given the only similarity between Edge (the game) and Bobby Bearing is it shares a perspective, it's horsecock of the first order to try and claim first dibs that way. Bobby Bearing sort of took elements of Spindizzy and mixed it up with where Ultimate had also gone a few years previous.

But! Have a gander through the old Softek catalogue on WoS or the list I compiled and Mr Langdell is being more than a bit rich anyway given his want to publish direct clones when it suited him. I'm pretty fucking sure he didn't have the Joust license y'know?

So you can freely add rank hypocrisy to Mr Langdell's canon there.

[Stegersaurus]

And as Brandon pointed out, they don't sell Edge in the U.S., so the $3.00 price tag gives it away, too.

ahh... that may explain it, if the image is being used to try and defend a US trademark then a magazine not sold in the US wouldn't help defend the case for the brand being used in the US.

[Craig Stern]

He's not filing for copyright infringement too, is he? I'd be interested to have a look at his complaint.

[Derek]

So, reading the documents more closely, it says that the cover is being submitted as a sample "of the EDGE brand as used in connection with computer hardware in various formats."  So I guess it's because of the EDGE Gaming PCs.

What it actually is is still anyone's guess, though.  (Besides an ugly Photoshop job, I think that's pretty obvious.  Or okay, it could be MS-Paint, who knows?)

By the way, the documents are all online for you guys to peruse:

http://tigsource.com/pages/edge-games/

Under "Documented court cases."

[Mipe]

Perhaps this case could be brought to attention of lawmakers. There are plenty of politicians eager to help for a bunch of fresh, sticky votes. 

[Lurk]

Mipey: I'm kind of pessimistic about that. You see, there are a lot of Langdell in the industry, you see them everywhere, multiplying game titles on their resumes without actually doing any kind of direct work on them. They give conferences, the press fawns over them because they are credible, they get credibility from all the media attention. I was wondering about that a few years ago. I came to the conclusion that many people operating in and around the gaming industry dislike video games.

They want them to be a profitable product, but not a game, that some recluse will spend a week-end toying around with to get the highest score. They don't want it to be the harsh mountainside the kid will struggle with until he reaches the top, ignoring exasperated calls from his mother to go play outside- and when he gets to the top, he has a feeling of being the first one to get there, even if the ending is a simple black screen with a pale white 'congraturations'.

In this market, bs is more important than actual facts. It takes, as an average, two years to create a commercial game from start to shipping. Anyone boasting a huge number(Langdell's 100-300, even considering 30 years of ACTIVE game development) is highly suspicious. Unless you count sitting behind a desk 'supervising' multiple game productions(I don't). But the media does. This would would be a typical situation:

Applicant: I've got about 8-9 years of experience in the industry.
Boss: Oh, and how many games did you work on?
Applicant: 3.
Boss: Mhh, that's not a lot.
Applicant: Well, Age of wonders took us a lot of time to get out. The second one also, but it went well when I worked on Dungeon Master.
Boss: Never heard of those. But we'll give you a try as a junior artist.

SleazeBag: Well, I've got a solid 30 years experience in the industry. I personally designed around 300+ games, shipping more than a million units.
Boss: Wow! That's so impressive!
SleazeBag: Yes, I am.
Boss: OMG! We were looking for someone to fit an empty VP spot. You sound like just the guy. We'd also like you to give speeches to the press, you'll be the figurehead of our company.
SleazeBag: And a huge salary, without any kind of proof of actual work competence?
Boss: You got it buddy. It's so hard to find competent workers here. And you've got such a winning smile, the press will love you...

 

[Martin 2BAM]

Great investigative work!

I actually know someone of that descriptions that has a company that exploits his workers (10hs a day minimum, which is ilegal in my country) and has spoken in the GDC.
It's sad, but you're a "success case" and get to talk about it just for making profits... but nobody asks about the inmoral activities to undertake such success.

Meh

[Craig Stern]

Looking at the Cybernet documents now.

--The Complaint: after Langdell sent the company letters threatening litigation, Cybernet sued seeking a declaratory judgment that its trademark "Edge of Extinction" does not infringe on any of Langdell's marks. (Basically, they decided to take preemptive action.)

-- -- Exhibit B is a particularly obnoxious and misleading letter from Langdell insisting that any word combination involving the word "edge" infringes on his trademark rights as a matter of law. Either he doesn't understand how court decisions work, or he's trying to frighten people who don't know any better. Both seem plausible to me.

--The Answer: weirdly, Langdell claims to lack knowledge or information sufficient to form a belief as to whether personal jurisdiction, subject matter jurisdiction, and venue are proper when answering, then turns around and asserts that all three are proper in his attached counter-claim. The counterclaim rattles off a long list of the entities Langdell believes he's licensed his trademark to, then attempts to justify canceling Cybernet's trademark, and finally alleges likelihood of confusion.

-- -- In paragraphs 32-35, Langdell insists that he is a widely-publicized figure in the gaming world, a pioneer of gaming, a highly sought-after lecturer, and "on the Board of Directors of the International Game Developers Association, which is the largest game association worldwide." I don't know why: none of this has anything to do with his counter-claim.

-- -- Exhibit E, like most of the exhibits Langdell attached to his answer, is utterly self-serving. His evidence of having licensed "The Edge" to Diamond Multimedia is a print-out of a page from his own website, edgegames.com, apparently designed to look like an informational page on a third-party website. His proof of having sold Edge PCs, likewise, seems to consist of 1) a print-out of a similar page from his own website and 2) the fake Edge magazine cover that Derek discovered. That fake magazine cover, incidentally, is the only evidence Langdell offers of having licensed his mark for use by Edge magazine, other than a page printed off of (you guessed it) one of his websites.

Final thoughts: I really hope these guys don't roll over for Langdell. Every time someone decides to surrender and assign a trademark to Langdell, or license "Edge" from him, it just gives him more ammunition to bully other people with. If everybody went to the wall against Langdell, he would have been forced to abandon his trademark years ago for lack of use in commerce. </Rant>

[Movius]

Mipey: I'm kind of pessimistic about that. You see, there are a lot of Langdell in the industry, you see them everywhere, multiplying game titles on their resumes without actually doing any kind of direct work on them. They give conferences, the press fawns over them because they are credible, they get credibility from all the media attention. I was wondering about that a few years ago. I came to the conclusion that many people operating in and around the gaming industry dislike video games.

They want them to be a profitable product, but not a game, that some recluse will spend a week-end toying around with to get the highest score. They don't want it to be the harsh mountainside the kid will struggle with until he reaches the top, ignoring exasperated calls from his mother to go play outside- and when he gets to the top, he has a feeling of being the first one to get there, even if the ending is a simple black screen with a pale white 'congraturations'.

In this market, bs is more important than actual facts. It takes, as an average, two years to create a commercial game from start to shipping. Anyone boasting a huge number(Langdell's 100-300, even considering 30 years of ACTIVE game development) is highly suspicious. Unless you count sitting behind a desk 'supervising' multiple game productions(I don't). But the media does. This would would be a typical situation:

Applicant: I've got about 8-9 years of experience in the industry.
Boss: Oh, and how many games did you work on?
Applicant: 3.
Boss: Mhh, that's not a lot.
Applicant: Well, Age of wonders took us a lot of time to get out. The second one also, but it went well when I worked on Dungeon Master.
Boss: Never heard of those. But we'll give you a try as a junior artist.

SleazeBag: Well, I've got a solid 30 years experience in the industry. I personally designed around 300+ games, shipping more than a million units.
Boss: Wow! That's so impressive!
SleazeBag: Yes, I am.
Boss: OMG! We were looking for someone to fit an empty VP spot. You sound like just the guy. We'd also like you to give speeches to the press, you'll be the figurehead of our company.
SleazeBag: And a huge salary, without any kind of proof of actual work competence?
Boss: You got it buddy. It's so hard to find competent workers here. And you've got such a winning smile, the press will love you...

 

A video game company outside of Canada (or any company in fact) isn't going to make much money hiring obviously incompetent and fraudulent staff. Sooner or later a game has to be made that brings in income; This doesn't happen if you hire bad staff.

If this were the norm there wouldn't be much of a video game industry.

Not being Canadian or having any talent for management, Langdell has to rely on fraud or his license to extract money from the wallets of others.

an aside: Edge don't seem to have done anything non-court case related for many, many, many years. In fact, it's been that way since well before any lawsuits or public outcry. Perhaps everybody with any money to throw around already knew to beware of his bullshit well before it became public knowledge.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

A video game company outside of Canada (or any company in fact) isn't going to make much money hiring obviously incompetent and fraudulent staff. Sooner or later a game has to be made that brings in income; This doesn't happen if you hire bad staff.

If this were the norm there wouldn't be much of a video game industry.

Not being Canadian or having any talent for management, Langdell has to rely on fraud or his license to extract money from the wallets of others.

an aside: Edge don't seem to have done anything non-court case related for many, many, many years. In fact, it's been that way since well before any lawsuits or public outcry. Perhaps everybody with any money to throw around already knew to beware of his bullshit well before it became public knowledge.

it's not the norm, but there are parasites in any company. it's fully possible for a company to employ someone who brings no value to the company, or even someone who brings negative value, provided there are enough people who bring positive value also employed which counteract those people.

often it's the case where, in a group of, say, ten people, one or two of them does 80% of the work, and the rest do very little, and they're all paid the same. you see the same thing in groups in schools (when they assign group projects).

i agree it's not the norm though, but it can still be common without being normal or average

[Movius]

I'm not denying terrible employees get hired. But a complete systematic failure of recruitment generally isn't going to happen.

In fact, for most companies I'd guess it would be a terminal mistake if even one title in development suffered from this sort of failure.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i agree with that -- also note that langdell is not employed in the game industry, so if acting like langdell got you employed he'd be an employed parasite instead of a parasite using the legal system and the igda and game design sources at two-bit colleges to survive

[Stegersaurus]

I'd pay more attention to Movius' comments if he didn't make snide jabs at Canada...

[Μarkham]

I found something about Diamon's cards on this horrendous eyesore:

NOTE! Diamond Multimedia's rights to use our trademark in respect to the sale or support of their multimedia accelerator board "EDGE 3D" was terminated due to uncured breach of license in June 1996. Anyone having knowledge of Diamond's continued wrongful use of our trademark anywhere in the world is requested to contact us here at EDGE [email protected]

Still haven't seen any of those "LIVE ACTION FULL SCREEN FULL MOTION "NETGAMES"!", though.


[EDIT]
I found another faked magazine cover on http://web.archive.org/web/19991013020028/http://edgegames.com/ :


It would seem that he also claimed ownership of "Edge" college notebooks.  Not laptops, but books of bound lined paper.

[Oddbob]

Wow. Just wow.

[Shade Jackrabbit]

Damn you Markham. Now my eyes are bleeding.

[Oddbob]

Well, the IGDA position is clear that they're not going to call a meeting themselves, so it's up to the membership to do their thing now.

Nothing unexpected there really given their (lack of) response to date, however, the good thing to come out of that choice (albeit not for the IGDA) is that it means unless he resigns of his own accord (doubtful) he's not going to be slipping off the radar anytime soon to carry on with no scrutiny.

Which in a roundabout twisted way is sort of a good thing.

[Oddbob]

(un)Interestingly, I notice that one of the cover scans has been 'shopped too:

Here's the original:



And a WoS link to the advert and Lemon64 which I think is where GameFAQ's have nabbed their info from

10 points to whoever can spot the addition

http://www.tigsource.com/edge-games/5-08.pdf

[pgil]

Comic Sans?