Game maker sues over Ms. Pac-Man

[7800 2]

Apparently AtGames is being sued by Bandai Namco over Ms.Pacman.    https://www.worldipreview.com/news/game-maker-sues-over-ms-pac-man-18676

https://www.polygon.com/2019/9/25/20884111/bandai-namco-atgames-lawsuit-ms-pac-man-pac-man-flashback-blast-copyright-infringement

[+Charlie Cat]

4 hours ago, 7800 2 said:

Apparently AtGames is being sued by Bandai Namco over Ms.Pacman.    https://www.worldipreview.com/news/game-maker-sues-over-ms-pac-man-18676

https://www.polygon.com/2019/9/25/20884111/bandai-namco-atgames-lawsuit-ms-pac-man-pac-man-flashback-blast-copyright-infringement

 They are also getting sued by Walgreens as well for breach of contract. 

 

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-09-25-walgreens-suing-atgames-for-breach-of-contract

 

Videos of both lawsuits are on YouTube already by madlittlepixel.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 26, 2019 by fdurso224

[AtariLeaf]

One offs or the tip of the iceberg? If the breach of contracts extend beyond Walgreens to bigger companies like Walmart this could get ugly

[Shawn]

7 hours ago, AtariLeaf said:

One offs or the tip of the iceberg? If the breach of contracts extend beyond Walgreens to bigger companies like Walmart this could get ugly

 

Walgreens alone is claiming $1.6 million dollars being owed to them for unsold returns. One lawsuit would have been bad enough but two of them at the same time is really gonna hurt any company of the AT Games size. I hope it all works out for the best but something tells me it's gonna get ugly as you also stated.

[Shawn]

Looks like they have at least the Ms. Pacman part solved:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/atgames-acquires-ms-pac-man-related-rights-300925773.html

 

As for the Pacman problems, guess only time will tell.

[phoenixdownita]

40 minutes ago, Shawn said:

Looks like they have at least the Ms. Pacman part solved:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/atgames-acquires-ms-pac-man-related-rights-300925773.html

 

As for the Pacman problems, guess only time will tell.

From that PR:

 

"As part of our ongoing initiative to be caretakers of important cultural touchstones, we are privileged to gain these valuable rights pertaining to the iconic Ms. PACMAN arcade game," says Dr. Ping-Kang Hsiung, CEO of AtGames.

 

I always like the language they used after a lawsuit and related settling out of court .... unfortunately in that regard AtGames is no worse than any other corporation, always putting a spin .... obviously if they just gained the rights they didn't have them before and they knew it given how quickly they gained them. 

Truth be told "It's better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission." 

 

[ubersaurus]

Bandai Namco insists in their court filings that their agreement with GCC in 1983 gave Namco the full rights to Ms. Pac-Man - GCC and its successors would just get royalties off of sales related to the game. Bandai Namco was reportedly finalizing a deal with the GCC folks to essentially pay them out and never have to deal with royalties again when this all blew up.

 

AtGames may have thought they were buying Ms. Pac-Man rights, but it doesn't look like they did.

[JaqenHghar]

2 hours ago, Shawn said:

Looks like they have at least the Ms. Pacman part solved:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/atgames-acquires-ms-pac-man-related-rights-300925773.html

 

As for the Pacman problems, guess only time will tell.

 

It's not solved at all. This is half what the lawsuit is about. I watched the Mad Little Pixel video last night. The short of it:

 

GCC are the modders who made Ms. Pac Man, but they don't own the brand, Namco does. So I guess neither half can do anything with Ms. Pac Man without the other half's OK? Anyway, Namco has been trying to buy them out for years, and they were this || close, but a couple days before they were going to sign, AtGames swoops in and buys the rights from GCC, effectively scuttling Namco's deal. Odds are that move was a violation of the agreement between AtGames and Namco on its own, but even if it wasn't Namco was already pissed at them for what they saw as doing damage to their business. 

 

So Namco is still pissed, and suing over this very thing. Only if that press release is legit, much to Namco's dismay, AtGames is now the one joined at the hip with Namco over Ms. Pac Man.

 

They'll probably want the deal invalidated or to be awarded AtGames' interest as a way of recovering damages.

[+FujiSkunk]

Just my speculation (IANAL and all that), but I suspect AtGames is going to lose hard on this.  Maybe Namco didn't completely own the code to Ms. Pac-Man all these years, and maybe AtGames did legally acquire whatever GCC could still lay claim too, but that's a far cry from legal permission to produce a full-fledged Ms. Pac-Man game.  I figure at best all AtGames has legal permission to do is publish a Crazy Otto cabinet.  Ms. Pac-Man's initial creation was based on the understanding, later found invalid, that Midway's contract to distribute Pac-Man allowed them make any mods or sequels to the game they wanted.  Namco told them that was not the case, and it was only Midway's and GCC's agreements to give the Ms. Pac-Man character to Namco, if not everything related to the game, that kept Namco from suing them.

[Atariboy]

I wonder how Namco even knows what their rights are. One of the main guys at GCC wrote an interesting piece about this a few years ago and Namco didn't have a clue about the history of this game and the settlement when they were reminded by GCC a decade or so ago that they still exist and that Namco is supposed to be paying royalties. 

[Tanooki]

You know taking just Ms Pac-Man out of the argument for a moment, this is a larger case on the whole against atgames and I think BandaiNamco is going to have a field day with this one in court.  Sure the IP borrowing/theft over Ms PacMan in general is bad, but the bigger one is the history of issues.  The Blast unit where ATGames lied and peddled the arcade stuff to then sell consumers the shitty NES (compared to arcade, it's fine though) version which was very deceitful.  The claim pops that one out there along with the universal review panning going so far to order/tell/plead people to not buy that blast device which opens the door to clear case of their argument working about damaging their company and brand/ip (pac-man) due to how that unfolded.  The whole false advertising is an easy check off on that one, as is the unfair practices with the blast handling too.  Now to add back in the Ms Pac bits from marketing the small sized arcade cabinet clone they made at least 1-2 of the things to show off, and then the other stuff around the general part of the suit about control over the IP that is just getting nasty.

 

Now that walgreens one, I don't see how that one could possibly be misterpreted.  If that contract really did guarantee a sale, and if it did not, the excess was returned and refunded to Walgreens and they decided to ignore that contracted promise they deserve whatever damages swing through in the end as they're clearly owed some serious cash if the contract really said that.  And if it really did, what's this say about atgames on the whole if they can't and won't honor their contracts with retailers.  I guess we can figure we won't see their stuff at walgreens this year.

[+x=usr(1536)]

12 hours ago, Atariboy said:

I wonder how Namco even knows what their rights are. One of the main guys at GCC wrote an interesting piece about this a few years ago and Namco didn't have a clue about the history of this game and the settlement when they were reminded by GCC a decade or so ago that they still exist and that Namco is supposed to be paying royalties. 

This is a very valid point in all of this.

 

Something important to keep in mind about GCC: Ms. Pac-Man wasn't their first time at the Undecided Legality of Modification rodeo.  They got their start with the Super Missile Attack enhancement kit for Missile Command, which Atari sued them over on copyright infringement grounds.  GCC won the case as Super Missile Attack didn't reuse any of Atari's Missile Command code: it patched it in real-time after the game was booted.  Atari ended up contracting with GCC to develop three arcade games, the 7800, and a couple of other things for them as a result.

 

As this relates to Ms. Pac-Man and Namco: GCC took a similar approach to that game as they did with Super Missile Attack in that the game was designed as an add-on to Pac-Man PCBs, and Namco's code wasn't reused in GCC's modifications.  The game was also developed not as a Pac-Man game, but as Crazy Otto - and while the resemblance to a maze game in which your character eats dots and ghosts was there, none of Namco's trademarks were used in its creation.  That didn't happen until later when Bally/Midway was shown the game and decided to pick it up as a Pac-Man sequel due to Namco not developing one of their own that could be licensed.

 

All of this also goes some way towards explaining why Namco was not completely cognizant of the ownership or licensing of the game, and the subsequent retroactive royalty payments that incurred for them.

 

Here's where this is relevant to AtGames' purchase of the rights to Ms. Pac-Man:

1. It doesn't give AtGames the rights to either Namco's Pac-Man games or the ones that Bally/Midway distributed.  Ms. Pac-Man is where the buck stops, largely due to its entanglement with GCC.
2. It likely doesn't give them the rights to Namco's code as found on Ms. Pac-Man PCBs; only the GCC-derived code would be considered theirs.
3. I have no idea as to who gets ownership of the trademarked works (character design and art, cabinet design and art, etc.) associated with Ms. Pac-Man.  That possibly could have been transferred to Namco from Bally/Midway, but I just don't know.
4. If it turns out that the answer to 3) above is 'Namco', then AtGames may be in a situation where they own the rights to the Ms. Pac-Man code, but can't sell it with any of the recognisable art or other service marks applied to it.  In this situation, it would be a safe bet that there is no way in hell Namco would license that to them now.

Yeah, AtGames sucks and so forth, but if they were able to get the rights to Ms. Pac-Man out from under Namco, well...  That's business.  Yes, it's crappy to see it go to AtGames, but right now it appears as though this is a situation Namco would like to turn to their favour largely because it would eliminate future licensing issues and solidify ownership of the franchise's IP.

 

Of course, this is all subject to the usual disclaimers that I Am Not A Lawyer and haven't seen enough detail of what's being brought to court to have a total understanding of the situation.  There's likely a lot here that we're not seeing from the peanut gallery, and that makes it hard to do much more than offer speculation.

[Akito01]

4 hours ago, x=usr(1536) said:

This is a very valid point in all of this.

 

 

1. I have no idea as to who gets ownership of the trademarked works (character design and art, cabinet design and art, etc.) associated with Ms. Pac-Man.  That possibly could have been transferred to Namco from Bally/Midway, but I just don't know.
2. If it turns out that the answer to 3) above is 'Namco', then AtGames may be in a situation where they own the rights to the Ms. Pac-Man code, but can't sell it with any of the recognisable art or other service marks applied to it.  In this situation, it would be a safe bet that there is no way in hell Namco would license that to them now.

 

Oh, you better believe that Namco has that trademark stuff on lockdown, and that is a big part of their suit. ATGames may well have bought the royalty rights and the ROM code, but they certainly don't own the name 'PacMan' or the character representations (think of it this way -if I develop my own Cola formula, I can't sell it in stores as 'Ms. Coca Cola'). We're now in a situation where BandaiNamco can't do anything with Ms Pac Man without a royalty agreement with ATGames, and ATGames can't do anything with Ms Pac Man without a trademark agreement with BandaiNamco (and what are the chances of that at this point?). In effect, Ms Pac Man is now a commercially dead property. 

 

To quote DJ Khalid: congratulations, ATGames, you played yourself.

[JaqenHghar]

17 minutes ago, Akito01 said:

To quote DJ Khalid: congratulations, ATGames, you played yourself.

I thought most DJ Khalid quotes involved "yeah!" and "DJ Khalid!"

[Atariboy]

Namco was quite aware of Ms. Pac-Man and had input in its development. It was only when it became a smash hit did they sue. So one would seem to think they'd be aware of their settlement with GCC, but they somehow conveniently forgot it for years while regularly rereleasing Ms. Pac-Man, until GCC reminded them of their obligations. 

 

https://www.fastcompany.com/3067296/the-mit-dropouts-who-created-ms-pac-man-a-35th-anniversary-oral-history

 

And Akito01, I believe the fallacy AtGames may have made was in believing that licensing Pac-Man from Namco and securing GCC's rights to Ms. Pac-Man (Which as x=usr(1536) says, was just a GCC developed add-on board to the Ms. Pac-Man boardset) was all they needed to utilize the Ms. Pac-Man IP legally. 

 

I don't believe AtGames ever foolishly believed they owned the Pac-Man name or the game. That was all legally licensed and much like Bally/Midway and GCC did back in the day, it appears like AtGames believed they could legally piggyback this other game onto that license after securing those rights that GCC held. 

Edited September 27, 2019 by Atariboy

[+FujiSkunk]

35 minutes ago, Atariboy said:

I don't believe AtGames ever foolishly believed they owned the Pac-Man name or the game. That was all legally licensed and much like Bally/Midway and GCC did back in the day, it appears like AtGames believed they could legally piggyback this other game onto that license after securing those rights that GCC held. 

That makes sense.  If that's close to the truth, then it would be rather ironic given how it was that kind of "understanding" that led to Ms. Pac-Man's creation in the first place.

[MrMaddog]

So basically, Namco owns the Ms. Pac-Man name & IP but GCC still owns the game code.  This is Donkey Kong all over again...

 

So what's gonna happen to all digital versions of Ms. Pac-Man during this legal quagmire, will they get pulled and delisted? ?

[+x=usr(1536)]

1 hour ago, MrMaddog said:

So basically, Namco owns the Ms. Pac-Man name & IP but GCC still owns the game code.  This is Donkey Kong all over again...

That's mostly correct, yes.

 

GCC owns the portion of the Ms. Pac-Man code that they developed as an add-on PCB for Pac-Man.  Namco owns the rest (including the original Pac-Man code necessary for the non-GCC parts of Ms. Pac-Man to be able to run on a modified Pac-Man PCB), if my understanding of the situation is correct.  Which it very much may not be, because ownership is not 100% clear in this case.  That much at least should be accurate, however.

Quote

 

So what's gonna happen to all digital versions of Ms. Pac-Man during this legal quagmire, will they get pulled and delisted? ?

Probably nothing, assuming that the licensing and royalty agreement between Namco and GCC is still in place and being honoured.

Edited September 28, 2019 by x=usr(1536)

[+x=usr(1536)]

22 hours ago, Akito01 said:

Oh, you better believe that Namco has that trademark stuff on lockdown, and that is a big part of their suit.

Well...  Maybe.  What I suspect is that Namco believes that they own the rights to Ms. Pac-Man in their entirety.  Given the past history of Namco paying royalties to GCC for the use of the Ms. Pac-Man code that GCC developed, this is clearly not the case.

 

To my mind, this is where Namco is seeking a jury trial to determine ownership: if a jury doesn't understand that only a portion of the code on a Ms. Pac-Man PCB was developed by Namco (with the rest having been created by GCC), that jury may find in favour of Namco and award them full rights to the game.  It's not an implausible scenario, particularly given that the rights to Pac-Man are indisputably Namco's, and a sharp lawyer would be able to persuade a jury that Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man are fundamentally the same game due to sharing some of their codebase.

 

This would unencumber Namco from having to continue making royalty payments to a third party (AtGames, in this case), and permit them to do basically anything they want with the totality of the Ms. Pac-Man IP, including the GCC-developed code.  Effectively, it would eliminate the potential for outside entanglements.

22 hours ago, Akito01 said:

ATGames may well have bought the royalty rights and the ROM code, but they certainly don't own the name 'PacMan' or the character representations (think of it this way -if I develop my own Cola formula, I can't sell it in stores as 'Ms. Coca Cola').

True, and something that has confused me throughout all of this is why there seems to be a perception that the totality of Pac-Man-related IP is somehow at peril here.  It's not.  The issue is with ownership over the various parts of Ms. Pac-Man, and although Namco identifies themselves (correctly) in the court filing as the originators of the Pac-Man IP, they aren't seeking to win back ownership of that IP from AtGames because AtGames doesn't have that ownership.

 

Granted, the court filing makes for some very dry reading, but it makes it appear as though what Namco is seeking is to consolidate ownership of Ms. Pac-Man under their roof - at least from my reading of the filing - but that's pretty much it.

 

22 hours ago, Akito01 said:

We're now in a situation where BandaiNamco can't do anything with Ms Pac Man without a royalty agreement with ATGames, and ATGames can't do anything with Ms Pac Man without a trademark agreement with BandaiNamco (and what are the chances of that at this point?). In effect, Ms Pac Man is now a commercially dead property. 

I disagree.  Namco was able to exploit the Ms. Pac-Man property under the terms of their agreement with GCC; the same should be possible with AtGames.  Where I can see Namco not being happy about that, though, is that it sounds as though they were never consulted regarding the transfer in ownership of GCC's assets, which would create all sorts of contractual issues.

 

[Shawn]

I see where I got the wrong idea here. I was reading it as AtGames bought the full rights to the Ms.Pacman character,etc. and not just the code from the Crazy Otto game which was rebranded Ms. Pacman for which GCC gets royalties for. This is a serious mess that AtGames seems to have willingly got themselves into with Namco. 

[atarilovesyou]

I can see this spell the end for inclusion of Ms Pacman in future classics compilations, if Namco wins and decides to not play ball with AtGames.  Which would be a shame, buts it's not like we don't have a bazillion other ways to play it anyway.

[+FujiSkunk]

Jakks and Namco themselves have handled the Namco plug-n-plays, not AtGames.  I doubt that will be a problem.

 

The arcade plug-n-plays have kind of been played out anyway (no pun intended).  Other than the FlashBack Legends thing, it's been a while since I've seen any new ones for sale.  Instead we have miniature (and no-so-miniature) arcade cabinets to buy.

[Tanooki]

Bandai for the last few years have been selling one that looks like a bit 8bit pac-man body with a break away rear to it to hide the a/v cable in there.  Battery powered only, saves your high scores, decent game selection.

[negative1]

Both this lawsuit, and the Walgreens lawsuits have been dismissed:

 

 

 

later

-1

[+Random Terrain]

47 minutes ago, negative1 said:

Both this lawsuit, and the Walgreens lawsuits have been dismissed:

 

 

 

later

-1

 

4:44 Name coe? I thought it was nam coe (rhymes with lamb)?