Star Control: Famous Battles of the Ur-Quan Conflict, Volume IV is an action-strategy video game developed by Toys for Bob and published by Accolade. It was originally released for MS-DOS and Amiga in 1990, followed by ports for the Sega Genesis and additional platforms in 1991. The story is set during an interstellar war between two space alien factions, with humanity joining the Alliance of Free Stars to defeat the invading Ur-Quan Hierarchy. Players can choose to play as either faction, each with seven different alien starships which are used during the game's combat and strategy sections.
Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by former Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry and promoted the designers and programmers responsible for its games as "software artists". EA published numerous games and some productivity software for personal computers, all of which were developed by external individuals or groups until 1987's Skate or Die! The company shifted toward internal game studios, often through acquisitions, such as Distinctive Software becoming EA Canada in 1991.
Accolade, Inc. was an American video game developer and publisher based in San Jose, California. The company was founded as Accolade in 1984 by Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead, who had previously co-founded Activision in 1979. The company became known for numerous sports game series, including HardBall!, Jack Nicklaus and Test Drive.
A video game clone is either a video game or a video game console very similar to, or heavily inspired by, a previous popular game or console. Clones are typically made to take financial advantage of the popularity of the cloned game or system, but clones may also result from earnest attempts to create homages or expand on game mechanics from the original game. An additional motivation unique to the medium of games as software with limited compatibility, is the desire to port a simulacrum of a game to platforms that the original is unavailable for or unsatisfactorily implemented on.
EA Vancouver is a Canadian video game developer located in Burnaby, British Columbia. The development studio opened as Distinctive Software in January 1983, and is also Electronic Arts's largest and oldest studio. EA Vancouver employs approximately 1,300 people, and houses the world's largest video game test operation. It is best known for developing a lot of EA Sports and EA Sports big titles, including EA Sports FC, NHL, SSX, NBA Street, NFL Street, EA Sports UFC, and FIFA Street titles. As well as a number of NBA Live and NCAA Basketball titles between 1994 and 2009.
Retrogaming, also known as classic gaming and old school gaming, is the playing and collection of obsolete personal computers, consoles, and video games. Usually, retrogaming is based upon systems that are outmoded or discontinued, although ported retrogaming allows games to be played on modern hardware via ports or compilations. It is typically for nostalgia, preservation, or authenticity. A new game could be retro styled, such as an RPG with turn-based combat and pixel art in isometric camera perspective.
The Sega Genesis, known as the Mega Drive outside North America, is a 16-bit fourth generation home video game console developed and sold by Sega. It was Sega's third console and the successor to the Master System. Sega released it in 1988 in Japan as the Mega Drive, and in 1989 in North America as the Genesis. In 1990, it was distributed as the Mega Drive by Virgin Mastertronic in Europe, Ozisoft in Australasia, and Tectoy in Brazil. In South Korea, it was distributed by Samsung Electronics as the Super Gam*Boy and later the Super Aladdin Boy.
The Duel: Test Drive II is a 1989 racing video game developed by Distinctive Software and published by Accolade for Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Apple IIGS, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, MSX, ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, Sega Genesis and SNES.
Donald Allan Mattrick is a Canadian businessman who previously was the CEO of social gaming company Zynga and the president of the Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft. Before joining Microsoft in 2007, Mattrick worked at Electronic Arts for 15 years as the president of Worldwide Studios. In 1982, he founded Distinctive Software, which was later acquired by Electronic Arts in 1991 and renamed to EA Vancouver.
Accolade's Comics is an adventure game released in 1987 and published by Accolade. It was developed by the co-founders of the Canadian firm Distinctive Software, Don Mattrick and Jeff Sember. The game intersperses action games into the plot.
Test Drive is a series of racing video games that were originally published by Accolade until they were bought by Infogrames, which later turned into Atari. The first game was released in 1987 and has since been followed by several sequels and spin-offs, the latest of which was released in 2024 and is the first by Nacon after purchasing the franchise from Atari.
Midway Manufacturing Co. v. Artic International, Inc., 704 F.2d 1009, was a legal case where the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit found that Artic violated Midway's copyright in their arcade games Pac-Man and Galaxian. The lawsuit was part of a trend of "knock-off" video games in the early 1980s, with courts recognizing that a video game can qualify for protection as a copyrighted audiovisual work.
Test Drive 4 is a racing game developed by Pitbull Syndicate and published by Accolade for PlayStation and Microsoft Windows in 1997. It offers 14 supercars and muscle cars, and tasks the player with beating computer opponents in tracks set in real life locales. The game's tracks are long courses with rural roads and urban streets, and commonly feature traffic and short corners. The player has to arrive at each checkpoint before the Checkpoint Timer expires, resulting in additional time, and crossing the finish line is required to complete the race. Test Drive 4's commercial success briefly made Test Drive the best selling racing franchise, but the game received mixed reviews. In 1999 the game was republished under the Greatest Hits label after selling 850,000 copies within one year of its release.
Test Drive is a racing video game developed by Distinctive Software and published by Accolade, released in 1987 for the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and DOS, in 1988 for the Apple II, and later ported for the PC-98 in 1989. It is the first game in the Test Drive series.
Abandonware is a product, typically software, ignored by its owner and manufacturer, which can no longer be found for sale, and for which no official support is available and cannot be bought.
Sega Enterprises Ltd. v. Accolade, Inc., 977 F.2d 1510, is a case in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit applied American intellectual property law to the reverse engineering of computer software. Stemming from the publishing of several Sega Genesis games by video game publisher Accolade, which had disassembled Genesis software in order to publish games without being licensed by Sega, the case involved several overlapping issues, including the scope of copyright, permissible uses for trademarks, and the scope of the fair use doctrine for computer code.
Atari Games Corp. v. Nintendo of America Inc., 975 F.2d 832, is a U.S. legal case in which Atari Games engaged in copyright infringement by copying Nintendo's lock-out system, the 10NES. The 10NES was designed to prevent Nintendo's video game console, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), from playing unauthorized game cartridges. Atari, after unsuccessful attempts to reverse engineer the lock-out system, obtained an unauthorized copy of the source code from the United States Copyright Office and used it to create its 10NES replica, the Rabbit. Atari then sued Nintendo for unfair competition and copyright misuse, and Nintendo responded that Atari had engaged in unfair competition, copyright infringement, and patent infringement.
Tryon "Tarrnie" M. Williams is a Canadian businessman. He is the founder of Canada's first publicly traded software company, Sydney Development Corporation formed in 1978. From 1987 to 1991 he was President and CEO of Distinctive Software Inc. of Vancouver. After the acquisition of that company by Electronic Arts Inc., he became President and CEO of Electronic Arts (Canada) Inc.
Sydney Development Corporation ("SDC"), was the first publicly-traded software company in Canada. Founded by Tarrnie Williams, SDC developed an online real-time project management system for the IBM System z mainframe computer, then various different business applications for microcomputers such as the Apple II, and eventually became the first developer and publisher of computer games for microcomputers in Canada.
The protection of intellectual property (IP) of video games through copyright, patents, and trademarks, shares similar issues with the copyrightability of software as a relatively new area of IP law. The video game industry itself is built on the nature of reusing game concepts from prior games to create new gameplay styles but bounded by illegally direct cloning of existing games, and has made defining intellectual property protections difficult since it is not a fixed medium.
