Why Marvel vs Capcom 4 is never coming

Squishing shoulders!

The Marvel vs Capcom series is my favorite series of videogames. Frantic action, screen filling visuals, and recognizable characters all come together to create something truly special.


X-Men: Children of the Atom, the first in what would become the series, hit 20 December of last year. The historical context is important.

Marvel was at the height of a comics bubble that was about to crash the entire market. However, they had found great success in licencing their properties into cartoons, especially Fox's X-Men. And so, they licenced Capcom to make a fighting game.

Capcom was also riding a boom: a Sonic Boom. The success of Street Fighter 2 had created wave of imitators that became the fighting game genre. While the Street Fighter brand remained strong, Capcom did began to diversify it's fighting game output, uncluding 1994's Darkstalkers.

X-Men: Children of the Atom was a big success, and begat Marvel Super Heroes, a game taking on the general Marvel universe, which eventually led to a series of  crossovers with Capcom that became known as the Vs Series, starting with X-Men vs Street Fighter.

The latest game, released in 2011, might be called Marvel vs Capcom 3, but it's really either the 5th game in a crossover tag-team series or the seventh game in Capcom's Superhero fighting game series, depending on how you want to look at it. Whether that would also include Capcom's other crossover's with Japanimation company Tatsunoko, rival company SNK, or with Tekken, well, that'a also up to the reader, as the mechanics are sufficiently distinct as to consider them separate.

So what do we have to look forward to in the series? Well, things have changed a bit. The fighting game genre isn't quite as booming as in the early 90's, is it? Most of the franchises that set up shop there are already gone. Capcom itself is now in the position Marvel was back then, of trying to license it's product into movies. It's found great success with Resident Evil(in that, and in general)  and is currently busy promoting Street Fighter 5.

Marvel, however, has changed, too. It saw so much success from licensing it's works into movies, it started doing the movies themselves. And THAT was so successful, Disney bought it.

Disney's plans for Marvel in terms of videogames seems to ever less involve licensing out, and more to involve natively making works. While that may eventually change in the over 40 years that most of these characters will remain copyrighted, the sad reality is that it probably won't.

Curiously, within this next decade, most of the characters from Silver Age would already be lapsing, according to the laws of their day.  This includes Spider-Man, Galactus, and most of the original X-Men. While Capcom would certainly not be able to use the word "Marvel" in the title, it would sure enough be able to use Spider-Man and Cyclops in an ensemble cast of sorts. Captain America, having been made in the 40's, could have already been in a game.

So I'm not trying to say Marvel vs Capcom 4 is a casualty of long copyright, but it's certainly keeping these characters out of the public's use. Would YOU like for Captain America, Marvel Girl, and Galactus to be public domain before the 2050s? Chime in below!

Read More

Joe vs the Nintendo

It seems weird to say, but we're still adjusting to the existence of the World Wide Web. Some of you where born to a world where connecting with everyone else via the internet is normal, but many, many more weren't, including the one who writes this piece. Even those working on the technology business just don't understand fully what is happening.

There's Let's Plays. You watch someone ELSE play a videogame. You know how I used to call that before the Internet? "Is it my turn yet?" However, I'm not surprised it's become somewhat popular and lucrative.

To make this a bit more grand than it probably is, you're not just playing a videogame with no interactivity, or watching cousin Joel hog all the  Super Mario World to himself, but rather  opening up a window to another person's mind, at the cost of nothing but  a bit of time.

Nintendo, and other companies with similar minds, don't think that's something you should be able to do, without paying them.  In concordance with Youtube, and under the ever widening umbrella of our copyright, Nintendo totally expects those who monetize videos of themselves playing Nintendo games to cut them a bit of the share, or kiss those videos goodbye.

A Let's Play is not a "Performance" or a "Reproduction". It's a documentation of an event. Nintendo should not be the ones  earning money from that. That's fair use!

Other companies, such as Capcom , have taken a different approach: taking down negative  discussions of their videogames by flagging videos for copyright. Youtube has a pretty strict "Better safe than sorry" policy regarding copyright, and that makes it an ordeal to finally prove that, yes, their video is a Fair Use video.

And people get angry with Youtube's way of handling copyright, which includes automatic scanning of videos for copyrighted content. But can you blame them? They're the world's most used video hosting site. According to current law, if they where to be sued for enabling the distribution of copyrighted content, they'd be facing  a loss of thousands of dollars FOR EACH COUNT, without mention of the court costs.  Now multiply that by all the videos being put on Youtube that contain copyrighted content NOT made by the poster, and you can see how it could bring the whole thing down. They MAY or may not want to side with the Angry Joes of the world, but they certainly can't afford it.

The law was not made for this. The law was not made thinking that one day a recording of yourself playing a videogame might be something  people would be able to monetize.  That I understand. What I don't understand is how companies who live and breath digital technology fail to embrace this new  cultural dynamics as a feature, and not as a bug.  Will "cutting a check to Nintendo" catch on? Time will tell.

Read More

Play me a song, you're the chiptune man...

 

In a few years, it'll be 28 years since 1995. According to copyright laws long since bulldozed, at this time we'd be having videogames for the Nes, Snes, and Sega Genesis enter the public domain.

It's funny to imagine what a world would be like if 99% of all videogames would become public domain. Can you imagine being able to play those games of old...is what I would ask if it wasn´t already possible. Thanks to emulator technology, the games of old, from those who are still bankable to those that licensing and technology would leave behind remain accessible to those unafraid of an FBI raid on their house destroying their lives.

This resurging interest in old style games, in itself, has enabled a growing interest in old style game music. Scour the internet, and you´ll see the trend of chiptune music, music made from  primitive low quality music samples played in sequences similar to what was done in  old games, when games did it because of limitation in memory and storage, but which gave this "game music" a style of it's own. From original compositions, to remakes of more modern songs, to websites dedicated to sharing the samples that can be used for such a thing, the interest in these old bleeps and bloops is stronger than it was before the interet.

 

This might give you a clearer idea

When we discuss the idea of videogames becoming public domain, often people feel that, at our heart, our protest is about not being able to have "free shit that doesn't belong to us, which cost somebody blood sweat and tears to make." But I want you to make an exercise with me:

The premise is this: Let's say every Nes, Snes, and Sega Genesis game had five songs. I can't vouch for the accuracy of that, because the amount of games we're talking about is enormous, but let's say five as a conservative figure.

There are 713 amount of official games for the Nes, 721 ammount for the Snes, and 915 ammount for the Sega Genesis. Put together all those games make 2349 ammount of games.

Now, before I tell you the amount YOU ALREADY LOOKED IT UP IN THE CALCULATOR? LET ME MAKE MY POINT! 99 percent of all works used to lapse  when  re-registry was required, so by that logic most of these games and their 11745 songs would have been public domain, but there's a bit of a catch: Many of these where based on preexisting properties, so songs based on that would obviously not become public domain if the property itself remains copyrighted. So it wouldn't be this amount exactly. The other caveat is that I didn't count all the games for the Gameboy, Virtual Boy, Atari Jaguar, 3DO, Arcade, PCEngine, Game Gear, Sega Master System and more that existed back then, so the real amount of songs we'd be able to use should actually be much, much, muuuch higher even when taking into account preexisting copyright, multiple versions/ports, and he odd game that had less than 1 song.

And sure, maybe you want to be original and not set your love scene to "Lesbian Match" from '89 Dennou Kyuusei Uranai because you want to be original. That's fine. But is it so wrong to have a CHOICE between using in a new work music that, let's be frank here, nobody is making any money out of anyway or just making something new?

This is the real tragedy of our current copyright system. Not that I can't play the latest Halo for free 95 minutes after it's come out without facing legal action: but rather that I can't play Halo's Theme in my own game I made until 95 years after it's invented, or even a song from Konami's Raging Fighter for the Gameboy. And no, Martin O'Donnel isn't losing money every time you make a cover of the Halo theme, because Martin O'Donnel makes money COMPOSING, and that theme is ALREADY COMPOSED. He can't compose it anymore, and he certainly can't use the same song on other games, since Micros owns it.



I believe it was Jesus that said that The Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath. The laws do not exist in thin air, they are meant to bring a benefit to the people. Is there a benefit to locking 11745 songs behind a wall of legal uncertainty?  What are YOUR favorite songs in the bleep and bloop genre?

Read More

The Operative: No One Owns Forever

There's no videogames in the public domain. All of them are copyrighted, as soon as they exist, and for never less then 95 years. Don't look for them. From the oldest pong clone to the  newest Halo. They aren't public domain and won't be until after you have died. Companies don't have, in 95 years, to prove they are interested in their work remaining under copyright.


So don't be surprised when cases like this happen: Nobody knows who owns The Operative: No One Lives Forever and The Operative 2: Agent in H.A.R.M.S Way.

Both games where first person shooters for PC in 2000, the games where set in a kitchy campy 60's espionage universe, where the player was thrust into the platform boots of Cate Archer. I've never played them, but I've also never read about them sucking or anything.

 There have been mergers, buyings, and at least Activision is pretty sure it doesn't own it. And so, since nobody knows who owns it, a company that releases old PC games is taking the legal risk of trademarking these game's titles, maybe hoping  to rerelease them.

It's a risky venture. While the trademark(identifying name of a product or service) can be challenged for lack of use and gained, copyright(right to duplicate, and make derivative works) would remain. Should these well meaning re-releasers infringe on the copyright of these games, and the actual owner re-emerge, they are opening themselves up to a liability of thousands of dollars worth of lawsuit.

In the past, copyright had a "midway point" on which a small fee extended said copyright. These prevented situations like these, where the copyright owner is nowhere to be found(known as 'Orphan Works'), from lasting over 70 years, after which the work could no longer exist. If everyone worked within our current copyright system, These games, and many more, would simply be lost forever waiting for owners that don't know or care that they own a piece of gaming history if not for pirates and hobbyists.

One day it'll be 95 years since  2000. By then it'll be too late to go looking for copies of videogames to preserve them and remake them. How old will YOU be in that day? Will you be alive?

Read More