Ur-Quan Masters

Оригинал новости

Unfortunately there appears to be a growing legal conflict between us and Stardock. We started out confused at what Stardock said and did. We tried to be reasonable and settle the problem quietly, but now after months of debate we are flat out mad! First, a little background information on just our side of the story:

• In 2013, Stardock bought a limited set of Atari’s assets at a bankruptcy auction -- primarily the name and trademark Star Control® and certain original aspects of Star Control III, like the space cows. It’s our opinion that Atari’s rights to publish our earlier games terminated over a decade before the auction and we contend that Stardock has zero rights to our games, including any code and other IP we created.
• As far as we can currently tell, we have no relationship with Stardock that lets them sell the three earlier Star Control games without our permission, either bundled with their other products or separately. That permission has not been given.
• Despite what Stardock's Brad Wardell has recently said, including in this Ars Technica article, our games’ universe has absolutely no connection, hyper-dimensional or otherwise, with Star Control®: Origins. (Note: We really don’t like other people putting our names in their diagrams without asking us first.)

Stardock now seems to think that not only can they use our aliens, ships and narrative without our permission, but thinks that we cannot make a sequel to The Ur-Quan Masters without their permission -- this is where we got really, really angry.

When we started Ghosts of the Precursors™ we were looking forward to spending our time on fun, creative work, not fighting a legal battle to protect ourselves and our work. We have nothing but respect for the talented, passionate developers working on Star Control: Origins, but we apparently have a BIG problem right now with Stardock’s management. We’ve been waiting 25 years to make Ghosts of the Precursors for our fans and we certainly won’t let this stop us. Go! Go! Go!

Оригинал новости

We've decided to stop selling our old games, because:

• We think it's necessary to 'clear the decks' to help resolve our definitely-not-harmonious, until-recently-private, months-long conflict with Brad Wardell and his lawyers at Stardock.
• The Ur-Quan Masters HD Project is a free, vastly superior experience. Did we mention it's free? Fans have been dedicated to improving UQM for 15 years and it is awesome! Hopefully Star Control I and III will also become available for free in the near future.

Why was it okay to sell the games on GoG, but not on Steam or elsewhere?

The simple answer is because we have had our own direct distribution agreement with GOG since 2011 and no agreement with Stardock or Steam or anyone else. If you're into details, here goes:

• In April 2011, we learned that Star Control I, II and III had been re-published on Good Old Games (GOG) — a big surprise since the games hadn’t been sold for years and no one had contacted us for permission to do so.
• We reached out to GOG who said our games had been offered to them by Atari as part of a large batch of older Atari products. We then contacted Atari to let them know that we were the original authors and owners of the copyright to the games and that we had not given permission for them to republish our work. Atari checked with its lawyers and wrote back confirming our claims, apologizing to everyone for the mistake and informing GOG to remove the games from sale and pay any royalties earned to us.
• Instead we suggested a way that GOG could continue to sell our games. GOG signed separate, independent contracts with: Atari to license the Star Control trademark, and us to license the rights to the games themselves. GOG has been selling the games and paying us directly ever since.
• In October of this year, history repeated itself when Stardock began selling our games on Steam and elsewhere (even bundled with theirs), again without getting our permission. This time we couldn't come to an agreement, so we asked that Stardock stop bundling and selling the games. They refused, so we've decided to end our 2011 distribution agreement with GOG as a first step to having the games pulled down.

Оригинал

So what the Dickens is going on?! Well before we get to the details, let's step backwards in time a couple of months -- to a psycho-history-ish meeting where we and our lawyers were analyzing the various win and lose scenarios for the litigation most of you know so well. What amazed us was that the distinction between the most likely winning and losing scenarios was probably going to be relatively small. Worse yet, the negatives in all cases (loss of time, money, sanity, not to mention further fan community strife) were predicted to grow dramatically over the next few months. As a fan of WARGAMES (starring a young Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy), I remembered WOPR's wisdom. After calculating every Global Thermonuclear War scenario the super-computer concluded that, "The only way to win is not to play the game." This seemed like a worthy approach. Now we'd tried court-managed settlement with no progress and private mediation was also proving to be as elusive as the Questing Beast. So we decided to throw a bit of a Hail Mary pass and just call Brad Wardell directly -- something he'd actually suggested more than a year earlier -- but first, we needed to find some kind of common ground which turned out to be... bees. Yes, bees.

Seriously. Bees?

I (Paul) have a life-long dream of learning every Medieval villager skill. Raising bees has always been on my list, so that I could make mead (wine) from honey. I decided to cut out the middle-man (middle bug?) and just buy honey, but my desire to raise bees remained. So when we called Brad Wardell my first sentence was something like, "Before I start talking about settling our legal conflict, I'd like to talk about bees." The conversation about bees, honey, mead, and bee stings went on for quite a while before we moved on to the talking about the case. Our perspective was this: we don't like fighting, but we love creating, so can we step waaay outside the box and settle our dispute through positive, creative actions rather than continuing to beat each other up? Brad listened and agreed, and this became the basis for settlement. Our lawyers are all smart, professionals with their client's best interest in mind, but it's worth considering that it was only when we communicated directly with each other that we made progress.

Details

The terms are not confidential. We won't be publishing the text of the agreement, but we are free to describe all of its contents.

This is honestly and truly an amicable settlement. Not only are we settling the lawsuit, but we’ve decided to support each other’s development so that the fan community gets two great games.

There is no 'loser'. All sides win, because we are no longer burning money, creative energy and the goodwill of our fans.

No money changed hands. We’re not only halting the lawsuit, but we’re committed to supporting each other’s projects and working together to rebuild the cracks in the fan community.

There is a weird paragraph in the agreement that involves bees. Seriously — no kidding. Brad Wardell is giving Fred and Paul honey from his hives and Paul is giving Brad some bottles of his homemade mead. Brad will also be giving Paul advice in how not to be stung. The lawyers thought this was pretty dang crazy. This goes to show you can find common ground in the strangest (and most delicious) of places.

Stardock will create new games in the Star Control franchise. Paul & Fred will create new games in the Ur-Quan Masters franchise.

To help differentiate the two franchises Paul volunteered to create a few new alien races for Origins.

Brad offered to help Fred and Paul with technology.

Stardock dropped all its alien name and character trademarks and all parties have dropped their oppositions to each other’s trademarks.

Both sides recognize each other’s copyrights and will not challenge them in the future.

We were able to come to a very specific understanding on the alien characters and races — how they look and act. Stardock is dropping all trademark registration of the alien names and won't use the described aliens without permission from Paul & Fred.

Star Control, Star Control II, and Star Control III will be coming back for sale by Stardock so that fans of all ages can enjoy the classic games in their original form. Paul and Fred will split royalties equally with Stardock.

Stardock, and Brad in particular, is supportive of Paul and Fred owning the Ur-Quan Masters trademark. All of us are committed to support the current UQM team and project, including their having a free, perpetual right to use the Ur-Quan Masters trademark for their amazing fan-powered recreation of the original game.

Stardock accepts that Paul & Fred are the creators of Star Control and Star Control II. Both parties agree that many other skilled people also contributed their talent and creativity to help make the games so great.

Paul and Fred will be changing the name "Ghosts of the Precursors" to something a little less generic -- (come on, you know we can do better!). The precise ‘when’ is unclear, but it is still several years off.

The settlement resolved all issues with all the parties, including Valve and GOG.

Paul enjoyed Origins enough to spend over 50 intense hours playing the game. He thought the jokes in the alien dialog were genuinely very funny and he was blown away by how beautifully interplanetary travel was rendered. Paul was especially delighted that he could remap the control keys to his beloved SpaceWar! configuration.

We are honestly very, very happy with the way everything has settled. No Dnyarri mental compulsion was needed.

Оригинал

Captain: Dnyarri! It's been 30 years since i've seen you. What are you doing here?

Dnyarri: Well what do you know, it's me!
Ah... I'm back. I mean, I never really went away. *cough*
You probably think I came back here to wish Paul and Fred like "Hey, happy 30th!" or whatever.
I don't know. I mean, who remembers that anyway? I don't.
In case you're wondering what I'm doing here, it is VERY interesting. So...
You know me. I'm a peaceful alien creature. And I kinda got stuck on that ship before it blew up.
Barely got out with my own skin.
Well, one thing led to another and I ended up re-entering the atmosphere on this planet.
And, uh... I don't know how to say this, but to make a long story short...
I ended up ruling over this species of snails. Well, shailoids, you know.
And I got into a war with like, species of other snails.
At the time it seemed interesting. I gotta admit, telling the story now it doesn't seem interesting.
Anyway, I eventually got off that, and I ended up here now, somehow. And that seemed ok.
You know, it was the 90s. There was a lot going on.
And since then... I have... I'll be honest. I'm trying to get off this planet. It is insane.
And not in a good way. I mean, there is good insane and bad insane and dumb insane.
You know which one you guys are. So anyway, the point is... Elon Musk.
Hah! Well, ol' Musky, we've been friends for a while. I mean, you may have noticed he's got quite the career.
Pretty unlikely, right? I had something to do with that.
So, Musky was supposed to be building me a spaceship. I mean, I made my instructions as clear as I could.
Build. Me. A. Spaceship.
Now he thinks he's going to Mars and all... well, the point was, he was on a really good trajectory here.
He was making the cars, and drilling the holes, and making the spaceship engines.
And then, I don't know what happened! Took my eye off the ball, I guess. Or took my brain off the ball.
And all of the sudden he's out of the building, running down the road to Twitter!
And I think I may have used a little bit too much brainpower on that guy because, frankly, he has been behaving strangely.
And this is coming from a guy who really entertained himself getting two alien snail species to fight each other almost to the point of extinction.
So I came here to ask for your help. I mean, let's talk to each other.
You know. You and the toad. Brain toad, I guess.
The point here is: I don't think I can get Elon back on task, and I need you to help me.
So here's what I want you to do.
I want you to get on your computers, and this is very important...
You MUST use ALL CAPITAL LETTERS because that is how you control peoples' minds on the computers.
So get the caps lock down and start twittering at Elon Musk like crazy.
I want you to say, "Elon, make a spaceship", "Elon, make a spaceship for the brain toad."
"Elon, the brain toad really needs you." and "Elon, why don't you send me a billion dollars."
'Cause, heck, he's really crazy! He might just send you a billion dollars. It's worth a try!