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[Alex May]

I never knew this.

http://www.nemmelheim.de/turrican/news/duke/

WTF!

[Alex May]

Of course, Turrican itself isn't a pure work, but there's a line between homage and... ripping art.

[sega]

Ah yeah, I saw that a while ago.  Those are some outright stolen graphics there.  It's strange how the artist decided to focus so hard on Turrican.  Why only that game?  To diminish the chance of getting caught?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I've seen it happen even on the SNES -- Super Ninja Boy stole art pretty directly from FF4 and Zelda 3. I don't have screenshots to back that up, but it's obvious if you've played all 3.

[MattJ]

Brazen theft but it's been used in Duke Nukem terribly, the game looks awful compared to Turrican. I suppose it looks like what it is, a bunch of stolen graphics cobbled together by a poor artist.

[Bad Sector]

Brazen theft but it's been used in Duke Nukem terribly, the game looks awful compared to Turrican. I suppose it looks like what it is, a bunch of stolen graphics cobbled together by a poor artist.

I don't know why it's so popular to bash games while you know nothing...

First of all the whole duke nukem games contain far FAR more tiles than those. Secondly most screenshots are from Duke Nukem 1, which was running in EGA. EGA means sixteen predefined colors. Compare this with the 4096 colors of Amiga and you can see why the graphics look so poor.

As to why the artist copied graphics? Many reasons... but we don't know them, we can only speculate (although to be honest, i'm almost sure that even if the reason was known from the artist himself, nobody would listen to him and decide their own "reason" instead).

In any case, note that the tiles there is not copied, but replicated and it's not identical either. Most tiles are modified in one way or another.

[MattJ]

Some of them are altered yes, but that takes a lot less skill than creating your own graphics. In my opinion the colour choice isn't what makes those Duke Nukem screenshots look bad, to my eyes it just looks unappealing and inconsistent. The style is all over the place, large stylised blocks next to intricate textured areas, lack of distinction between foreground and background. Maybe the game played great (I admit I havn't played it) but it looks ugly to me.

Interesting note: Amiga games didn't have 4096 colours, that was only available in HAM mode which virtually no games used due to performance. Typically you had 16 or 32 colours, or 256 on the AGA chipset machines (post Turrican 2). The colours were not predefined though, you could "mix" your own.

[ChrisFranklin]

Does it really surprise anyone that a company as shady as 3D Realms (who already have a history of shamelessly stealing one-liners in an effort to make their character seem hip and cool) would do something as innocuously wrong as stealing a few sprites for a shareware game in a time period where releases weren't years but months in between?

And yeah, I know it's Apogee, but a lot of the same people were around at both.

[Bad Sector]

3D Realms is actually Apogee. The same company with a new name, nothing else changed.

[ChrisFranklin]

3D Realms is actually Apogee. The same company with a new name, nothing else changed.

Oh wow.  While expanding my knowledge of shareware publisher history on Wikipedia, I found this: "While the company is now known as '3D Realms', the legal name of the company is still Apogee Software, Ltd."

[Arne]

The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.
- Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

If you steal from one author, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many, it's research.
- Wilson Mizner (1876 - 1933)

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.
- Howard Aiken (1900 - 1973)

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
- Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)

[Ryan]

No amount of evidence showing stolen graphics will ever make me not love Apogee's games with all my heart. Apogee is what made me love games.

That said, some of the outright steals are wrong in my opinion, they shouldn't have done that- (unless it was a homage or something). But with a lot of the graphics on that site, it was basically the same type of structure drawn in a different way. I see nothing wrong with that.