EA stole this man's game and made millions

there's this idea in certain game developer circles that the best games are the ones built around a simple but addictive idea Tetris is all about stacking blocks to fill rows minesweeper is about reading simple cues to figure out the location of a dozen or so mines in a grid and I'm not sure if I completely agree with that there are some great games which can't be described in a single sentence but make complete sense when you sit down and play them Ace Attorney danganronpa no no nine but I agree to an extent there's a certain beauty to a game built around a single addictive gameplay loop and in Japan in the 90s there was one company who specialized in developing games just like this games that were at their core simple but which you couldn't put down somehow the name of this company was Mitchell Corp and you probably won't recognize it they were always pretty nation fairly small they had somewhere in the region of 50 employees at their height but they shut down in 2012 after running out of money the president was this guy here Roy Ozaki and he never wanted to be running this company at all when his father passed away in the 80s no one from the Ozaukee family wanted to take over Mitchell Corp but since Roy had studied at a business college only a few years prior it was left up to him to take the reins of the company now before Roy joined Mitchell Corp was in the business of shipping goods around the world but this didn't interest him at all and so he shifted the direction by 180 degrees and focused on the world of gaming but money was tight really tight so every decision that Roy made had to be carefully considered he couldn't leap into developing huge expensive games he had to think carefully about what types of projects his company would take on he explained in an interview I don't want to invest in something that I know won't make money puzzle games are the easiest and cheapest things I know what I'm doing and so Roy and his friend koishi Neda began hiring and looking for ideas for their upcoming selection of puzzle arcade games and throughout the late 80s to late 90s this was business as usual for Mitchell Corp they had to be frugal they had no choice when larger companies like data East or Namco had leftover arcade machines Roy and his company would buy them up and use them for their own games regardless of the machines quality like for example at one point in 2002 Namco had a surplus of arcade boards called system two four sixes and according to Roy they were given this name for a particular reason you see in Japan there's this motorway called route 2 4 6 which is always backed up with huge traffic jams very slow and I think you can see where this is going this arcade board according to Roy was incredibly slow but Namco had some spare so Roy and the company bought them up anyway they had to make do however they could but in the late 90s someone within his company had a brain wave of really great idea for a puzzle game it was called puzzler and here's how it played you controlled the central character you could spin them around to point in whichever direction you wanted and surrounding this character was a sort of spiraling path which got closer and closer to your own position and as the game went on colored marbles would travel along the path getting ever nearer if they reached your player character it was game over luckily you could fight back using a sort of cannon you were to take aim in whatever direction you wanted and then shoot a marble at the enemy Brigade along the spiraling path if you had three of the same color touching they would all disappear keeping you alive just a little longer now their machine for this game was built on a leftover one from Capcom called the CPS - and there was a particular reason for that actually Roy's friend and second-in-command coachy NIDA who I mentioned earlier actually knew one of the higher-ups at cap corner as Roy explained in an interview Capcom's number 2 at that time he's our buddy especially neither's buddy so we order Capcom stuff when they want to get rid of stuff we hear about it and so Roy approached Capcom like hey got this puzzle game we were to develop could you sell us 1500 ports and usually if the Capcom representative was drunk enough they would say yes and this saved Mittal Corp a ton of money money which they sorely needed to hang on to and so in December 1999 buzz loop was brought to Japan's arcades and pretty immediately it was a success only one and a half years later Mitchell Corp released a sequel creatively titled cosmic 2 and with these successors under their belt it seemed like the puzzle oops saga was over little did they know which drama was lying over the horizon in August 2003 a little game called Zuma was released it might look familiar to you you spin your main character around take aim and shoot colored marbles at a line of fast approaching enemy marbles all moving along a track towards you yeah that should definitely sound familiar now the company developing it was PopCap Games if you never heard of their name you'll definitely have come across some of their work their first major release was bejeweled in 2001 a game as ubiquitous in the early 2000s as candy crush was a couple of years ago the whole draw of a game like bejeweled or candy crush is its simplicity you're just swapping gems around there's nothing confusing nothing difficult to understand it was a game for everyone and this was the secret to its success and with that huge hit behind them popcap games were looking for another similarly simple idea to become their next huge success and in 2003 that took the form of Zuma now you can imagine how Roy Ozaki and the team at Mitchell Corp reacted they were not happy pretty soon after Zoomers release in 2004 they announced they were looking at pursuing legal action in other words a lawsuit however by 2006 things hadn't progressed Roy explained in an interview my lawyers in Japan are supposed to be on this progress is slow because if we do court battle in u.s. we would be at a disadvantage you know the Americans in them and we will be up against American jurors and it turns out PopCap the company weren't much use either Roy explained PopCap Games his lawyer replied by mail and the one from my lawyer's office in essence they don't give a [ __ ] I think they knew what they were doing from the start and they are bad businessman you know that to think of a game and to actually make it takes a lot of energy and money ripping off someone else's idea is bad they don't belong in the game business eventually PopCap Games is CEO Jason Coppola explained that zuma is quote not an exact clone and that he was happy for developers to clone other people's games so long as they made some slight adjustments and I think that Zuma shows off that philosophy pretty clearly sure the tracks aren't always an exact circle like in paws loop and there seem to be a few differences with how the physics of the colored marbles are handled but that's about it that seems to be the only difference between the two games but a few years later things only got worse PopCap Games was bought by none other than Electronic Arts ea and before long a sequel to zuma called Zuma's Revenge was released for Nintendo's D s console and boy Ozaki was well furious he had eventually given up on his lawsuit cus would just be too high for his little company to handle especially given PopCap's new and very rich owners EA but he was not going down without a fight or at least a very angry interview statement in his words Zuma is out on the intend OD s why because PopCap Games was bought by Electronic Arts so Electronic Arts brings Zuma on the ds2 Nintendo USA and they put it right out that pisses right on me you may quote me on that you see this situation was especially painful for Roy because Nintendo of Japan had approached him in 2006 to bring a sequel to his very own puzzle oop to the D s and this was according to him extremely unusual normally it was developers approaching Nintendo to ask to have their games published on Nintendo systems but the entender of Japan had done the opposite they had reached out to Roy and asked him to put his game on Nintendo's Hardware and now only five years later Nintendo of America was letting EA but their clone of his game onto the exact same system alongside his it seemed so unfair in his words I told them this is morally wrong what you're doing so they can screw me but this is morally wrong ethics so you still want me to quote Nietzsche or something I can do that this is business anything in life that concerns ethics you don't cheat people and then keep making money that's not fair and you can quote me on that I'm pretty pissed off at all of this especially with the Americans in late August 2012 PopCap Games laid off 50 employees they were downsizing as a company and moving into the mobile games world and let me be clear that sucks there's not one bit of me that thinks that's justice or heaven forbid they deserved it these aren't executives being let go these are incredibly hard-working programmers designers artists and more who don't deserve in any way to be let go and coincidentally only a few months later in November of the very same year Mitchell Corp shut down completely or maybe not completely Roy was and is adamant that Mitchell Corp is open it's just not making games right now if Roy or one of his associates comes up with another good idea for a game they'll reopen the company right away but at least for now by all common measures the company is closed but there's actually a bizarre and I suppose somewhat tragic sense of irony in all of this because and I couldn't believe this when I first read it an almost identical series of events took place in the 90s only things were the other way around that's right this time it was Mitchell Corp who were accused of stealing another company's game idea this right now the name showing on screen is Mitchell corpse 1989 arcade game called pang it was the third game ever that the company released and was to my knowledge at least relatively successful spawning 5 or possibly six sequels that would certainly be considered a success in my books but where did the idea for this exciting puzzle game come from where exactly did Mitchell Corp get their inspiration let me introduce you to a little game called cannonball released by Hudson soft in the year 1983 for the personal computer this game features near identical gameplay to that of Mitchell corpse later hit pan now again there are some slight differences here and there but just like in the later incident the fundamental gameplay is identical now unlike pop Cup Mitchell Corp aren't claiming they knew of the original game however this whole pang cannonball topic seems to be a touchy one for Roy Ozaki when asked in an interview should be discussed cannonball he replied why no he was eventually pushed a little further and explained that he had never heard about cannonball until pang was finished now should we believe him it's hard to say from meeting just a couple of interviews with him why Ozaki seems like an unusual person to be around he's clearly talented at what he does that can't be denied but at times he comes across as jaded or even perhaps a little bitter of course I don't know him the only glimpse as I haven't his personality a brief snippets short interview applies this and that but if one thing is true why Ozaki just liked the company he ran for over three decades is an enigma and one I don't think will ever fully understand hey there thanks for watching to the end I hope you found this video interesting this was a bit of a departure from what I usually make in this channel so I hope you enjoyed it anyway be sure to follow me on Twitter at thomas g docs to keep up with me and updates and videos and so on and subscribe to this channel if you want to see more of my videos and i shall see you next week bye [Music]

Channel: Thomas Game Docs

Views: 2,256,514

Rating: 4.9269524 out of 5

Keywords: EA, Thomas Game Docs, plagiarism, Electronic Arts, Zuma, Lawsuit, Puzz Loop, Mitchell Corportation, Bejewelled, Popcap Games

Id: CPBlnyM9IMc

Length: 12min 55sec (775 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 12 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/vazgriz]

TLDR: Mitchell Corp released PuzzLoop. Pop Cap makes Zuma, a clone of PuzzLoop. EA buys Pop Cap and makes sequels to Zuma. Mitchell Corp sues EA, claiming that EA stole their game. The lawsuit goes nowhere and Mitchell Corp eventually goes out of business. Mitchell had also made the game Pang, which was very similar to an earlier game called Cannon Ball, made by a different company.

I don't know about Japanese law, but under US law, cloning a game isn't illegal or uncommon. Anyone can see a game mechanic in one game and make their own game using that mechanic. As long as the code and art are original, clones are 100% legal.

It isn't even wrong morally. Pretty much every game builds upon existing games and Mitchell Corp does this too (I don't believe his claim that he had never heard of Cannon Ball). Ideas are cheap, execution is what matters.

[u/TKAAZ]

Nice video, but EA didn't really steal his game.

[u/niconpat]

Puzz Loop is not really an original idea imo. In essence it's just a variation of Puzzle Bobble made by Taito in 1994. The core gameplay of both is shoot colored balls at a large group of advancing randomly colored balls, if three of the same color are touching they disappear, if they get to you game over.

Puzz Loop is probably different enough to Puzzle Bobble to be "legally" ok, but I think his moral high ground quotes are a bit hypocritical here.

Zuma is a clear 100% ripoff of Puzz Loop though. No denying that. At least Mitchell Corp came up with a variation on an idea.

[u/STEMemperor]

LOL at that projection about American courts.

Not saying American courts are a paragon of fairness but I would choose going against an American in one any day over going against a Japanese in one of their kangaroo courts.

[u/Voevod]

Maybe get to the point faster?

[u/anotheranonaccount5]

TL:DW Game cloner gets mad after his game is cloned.

Side note this post reminded me of this.

How to properly play Zuma

[u/JuanJeanJohn]

TL;DW: Japanese company called Mitchell Corp comes up with a puzzle game called Puzz Loop. Pop Cap Games releases a clone of it in the US called Zuma. EA buys Pop Cap Games, releases Zuma sequel on Nintendo DS. Years later, both the Japanese and US companies lay off employees. I had never heard of "Zuma" so not sure how EA made "millions" off of it - but they definitely ripped off the original game.

[u/[deleted]]

And they all copied Bust-a-Move and Puzzle Bobble.

[u/Achaern]

I clicked through. I don't quite know as the video is all over the place, but I'd say 'Zuma' is the game? Maybe?