Ricky Road: The open-source gaming community

A Legal Game of Chicken

The flash gorillas game has been online for 2 months and 20,000 people have played the game so far. Bitchin. And theres been no cease and desist in the mailbox yet. There was understandably some trepidation at first to bring the game online due to that very reason. After all, Gorillas has been released before. And our version is 100% identical to that first initial release. And in that first release there was a copyright line on the splash screen. See the below screenshot.

But - And thats a big BUT - there is no record that WE can find for International Business Machines and Gorillas in 1991. In fact there is no record of a copyright for International Business Machines and Gorillas ever. Even IBM and QBasic only turns up a few manuals. Feel free to search the copyright records for yourself.

If you find it please let me know.

I'm not very keen on legalese, as most developers aren't, but I think I can take some comfort in the legal rocks we have turned over. And I don't bring this up to taunt IBM or their legal team. Obviously a little company like us would never hold court with a mega corporation like IBM. The reason I bring it up is to possibly get people thinking and explain how we plan to proceed. I am approaching this humbly and hoping that we can continue to use the game simply because it's fun. After all lets not forget the DHTML Lemmings saga. And the return of the DHTML Lemmings.

Video Game Ancient History. 15 years ago.

At the time of the Gorillas/QBasic release (1991) the GPL was only 2 years old. The world of open-source as we know it was just the early developing passion of only a handful of people. The idea of releasing source code to the public on a major production application was very radical. People were not using the phrase "Open-Source" either, "Free-Software" (Free as in free speech, not free beer - Stallman) was the phrase. Also at that time Linus Torvalds hadn't even adopted the GPL for his project, Linux. So it is possible to think that IBM's QBasic team may not have been equipped to handle releasing source code to the public and still legally retain some semblance of intellectual property. It was uncharted legal territory. In their mind it was either hobbyist code or proprietary code. IBM being in the latter camp. So what do you do when you need to release source code as an example of your new interpreted language but it turns out that very source code is really pretty good software? So good that it is still wanted and desired today? Fake it, bro. Yeah, just lie about it. Put a copyright warning on it and hope that people don't propagate it.

Thats my take on it. I could be wrong. And unfortunately I can only speculate what happened and what possibly went through the minds at IBM. But the one thing that people told me before I released the game was to be sure you aren't stepping into a steaming pile of legal trouble you can't overcome. And I agree with that piece of advice. But I am sure I am not stepping into that very steaming pile...

And here is why...

Gorillas 2: The Return
Jorillas
3D Gorillas
Gorilla, Inspired by gorillas.bas (pop ups on this site)

And last but not least this:
Original Gorillas

Basically the game itself is freely propagated throughout the web in it's original form and several "inspired by" forms (as in, derived works). Some of those derived works have even gone so far as to copyright their newer version of the game. Has there been any legal action from IBM or Microsoft? Nope.

So in keeping with the tradition of "inspired by" gorillas spin offs, I am also releasing the game. But a little less like a spin off and more like enabling people to play the game in the original form. Often imitated, never duplicated. Except for the fact that we totally duplicated it. But outside of that very duplication, it's often imitated, never duplicated.

So y'all enjoy the damn game now. And once again, you're friggin welcome.