Grrr . . .

[jpskewedthrone]

So, in a recent LJ post, jimhines stated that if he'd only gotten his Goblin books published a few years earlier he could have caught the Hollywood market wave of twisted fairy tales, a la Shrek and the new Happily N'ever After. Basically, these movies have the same kind of flavor as his books, both published (Goblin Hero and the upcoming Goblin Quest) and those waiting to be sold and published.

I read the post, thought about it, mentally said, "At least there's no fantasy movies out there remotely close to Skewed Throne."

And then, through email, I get . . . this. It's a link to a trailer for a computer game that's either recently been released or is going to be released soon. It's about . . . an assassin. Ok, fine. How many fantasy computer games have assassins? Practically all of them. No worries. But if you continue to watch, as they point out the game's unique points, the creative way they've made the character interact with the world, climbing walls, pushing through the crowd, etc, etc, etc, they get to . . . "instinct".

The game version of instinct is . . . incredibly close to Varis' use of the river. The assassin's view of the world grays and the target is highlighted with vivid colors. No mention of bad guys appearing in red or anything like that, but if you watch the trailer . . . it's spooky.

Obviously, I couldn't have copied off of them, and they couldn't have copied off of me, since I assume creating a gaming module such as this requires years of work, just like writing ST required years of work for me. But it is kind of freaky. There was this theory posed once that ideas are like cosmic rays, passing through the world and striking a few people before moving on. And a few of those people use the idea and thus scientists, artists, etc on opposite sides of the world end up creating, writing about, etc the same thing, independently. Obviously, this is further proof that this happens, since I came up with an assassin who uses an aura-like river and they came up with an assassin using instinct.

Freaky.

But the game looks cool. Perhaps I should send the game creators a copy of Skewed Throne? Or is that inviting a lawsuit?

Comments

[coolmajaka.livejournal.com]

There was this theory posed once that ideas are like cosmic rays, passing through the world and striking a few people before moving on. And a few of those people use the idea and thus scientists, artists, etc on opposite sides of the world end up creating, writing about, etc the same thing, independently. Obviously, this is further proof that this happens, since I came up with an assassin who uses an aura-like river and they came up with an assassin using instinct.

Makes sense -- AC Clarke and a Russian (who's name I _should_ know) both independently invented the space elevator. Some ideas, well, their time is _now_, and it's just a matter of who expresses them first. The way I see it, you smoked those code monkeys with the idea, but, I am prejudiced :)

[jimhines.livejournal.com]

It's weird, isn't it? Stuff we think is so creative and original, and then you turn around and there's someone else riffing off the same idea.

[krteilman.livejournal.com]

that is really creepy. But as a game geek the game looks cool.

[doctodd.livejournal.com]

Does the agent or publisher handle stuff like that? I think you should approach them with the goal of getting them to adopt your novels for a followup game using the same engine. It's a natural.

I'm no lawyer, but I expect that the two are different enough so that a lawsuit wouldn't go anywhere. But in any case, you published first, so they would be the ones who would have to change things.