Unofficial Fan created 'King's Quest' Sequel given approval by Vivendi

The big thing that copyright holders want to stop with fan works is defamation. What happens when a fan game (or fan fiction, or whatever) is very poorly made, or contains questionable material, or something else that reflects poorly on the original work? For example, the Hot Coffee mod for Grand Theft Auto San Andreas--I know that the content was actually already in the game and the mod just unlocked it, but what if it had been a mod to add that content?
 
I wasn't sure if loaf was referring to my comment about sierra being sued or not reading the rules or just me being me. But just to set the record straight without getting into an argument. Here is a bit of info as found on sq7.org and also on spacequest.net:

[QUOTE="SQ7.org" ]Not only is the Droids B Us store still there, it even has a modified version of the Toys-R-Us giraffe logo. In one of the many lawsuits concerning the Space Quest series, Scott and Mark were sent to court concerning their in-game spoof of Toys 'R' Us (Droids B Us). They won the lawsuit, but they needed to change "Droids R Us" into "Droids B Us" in the EGA version. You might think they would have learned from this and that they would be a little bit more careful in the future. Not quite: years later the Two Guys even added a spoof of the official logo to the "Droids B Us" store in the remake of Space Quest 1! Oddly enough, they weren't sued again for that one. What's more, in Space Quest 4 when you return to Ulence Flats a remark states: "Smells like another lawsuit coming back to haunt the Two Guys from Andromeda".
[/QUOTE]
They were sued but that doesn't have anything to do with this I guess, anyway.
 
Ijuin said:
The big thing that copyright holders want to stop with fan works is defamation. What happens when a fan game (or fan fiction, or whatever) is very poorly made, or contains questionable material, or something else that reflects poorly on the original work? For example, the Hot Coffee mod for Grand Theft Auto San Andreas--I know that the content was actually already in the game and the mod just unlocked it, but what if it had been a mod to add that content?
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Actually, it's the other way round - people were concerned about the Hot Coffee mod precisely because it was existing, unlockable content. The media definitely wouldn't have made such a huge circus around it if it was just new content made by a fan - there's hundreds of games out there that people have made questionable mods for (usually silly teenage stuff - nudity in Tomb Raider, et cetera), and the media generally doesn't care. The companies that make these games do get concerned about such mods, but they generally don't bother to do anything about it.

Delance said:
I don't know, for as long as the game gets to be made, who cares. I understand what you are saying, but I don't know anything about the people making KQIX, and yet I might play it.
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Well, yeah, but how many other potential KQ fan projects were cancelled for fear of Vivendi's intervention?

...Well, all right, probably none in this case. But you get the idea - the makers of this project did everything they could to attract Vivendi's attention, and to bring them down on their own heads. This causes nothing but trouble for other fans, who are more interested in contributing to their favourite universe than in making themselves famous. If somebody made enough noise about a WC mod to make EA intervene, it would affect all the mods, not just that one.

Maj.Striker said:
However, if I, being a Wing Commander fan, created a wing commander game even with my main intent being to gain publicity out of it, I don't think that's necessarily wrong.
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I don't think there's anything wrong with benefitting as such from a fan project (heck, I've got Standoff on my CV...), as long as the project ultimately gives more to the community than you gain from it. But if your main intent is to gain publicity, then you can only harm the community by doing so - and if you still do it, knowing this (as these guys did - people warned them that calling the game "KQ7" would cause trouble), then you really are just a jerk, exploiting a property purely for personal benefit and damaging the community in the process.
 
To be fair, unlike "KQ9", the PR team wasn't acting like they were making a legitimate sequel to the series, primarily for the sake of drawing the legal department of the property's owner down on their heads for the sake of publicity.

Not that this excuses them for totally mangling Privateer for personal pimpage, mind you.
 
Well, yeah, they were -- the entire purpose behind the "Privateer Remake" was to do something quick and cheap to get HellcatV's Vega Strike project the professional attention he wanted.
 
I'm sure there are people involved who like Privateer, but the entire debacle was a calculated attempt at improving Hellcat's resume with a minimal amount of work.
 
Sounds like speculation to me. No one but Hellcat could know what you presume to.

Looking at news posts around the time PR was released, the VS engine does not seem to be overly hyped. In fact, the slashdot news post does not mention vegastrike once. It looks to me that a lot more attention could (and would) have been given to VS if the PR project's primary goal was to create personal glory for Mr. Horn (Hellcatv).
 
Well, when you're making a privateer remake, you shouldn't ever complain about being asked not to add stuff to the original game.
 
I don't think that has any significance in the slightest. The original privateer remake didn't suffer because of added features like turret-ai, or extra upgrades. It suffered because of general slopyness and subpar execution: A bad interface, out of place flight dynamics and ai, poor balancing, bugs, a poor marriage of some of the original privateer art with new resources, weird little text things (cargo.blank), leftover VS stuff that didn't quite fit, and the list goes on....

Gemini gold isn't better than PR because it stays truer to the original; GG is superior because it had better execution and fixed a lot of the bugs and glitches in the original version while driving forward a better marriage between the original and the new art resources.

Even though PR had some serious flaws, I find the lack of respect for the authors fairly appaling. Recreating Privateer and RF in their entirety, even if poorly done, is a very difficult task. Add to the fact that the remake (or now, gemini gold) is still evolving, and you have yourself a fairly impressive feat that warrants at least some respect.
 
Gemini gold isn't better than PR because it stays truer to the original; GG is superior because it had better execution and fixed a lot of the bugs and glitches in the original version while driving forward a better marriage between the original and the new art resources.
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The new art resources are the *original* 3D models.

Even though PR had some serious flaws, I find the lack of respect for the authors fairly appaling.
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I find the authors lack of respect for the source material, lack of respect for the community, interest in making quick names for themselves instead of putting out a quality product and constant attempts to attach their names to John Cordell's herculean efforts at fixing the problems they caused in the first place appalling.
 
Bandit LOAF said:
I find the authors lack of respect for the source material, lack of respect for the community, interest in making quick names for themselves instead of putting out a quality product and constant attempts to attach their names to John Cordell's herculean efforts at fixing the problems they caused in the first place appalling.
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Aren't most of the GG developers the same people who also made PR remake though?

Also, I would be very interested if you could show me where a PR author/s "attempts/ed to attach his/their names to John Cordell's herculean efforts at fixing the problems they caused in the first place."
 
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