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Examples of plagiarism in games

M

Maligna

Banned
With the recent example of Uncharted 4 using Ubisoft's art assets, whether intentionally or not, this got me thinking about the topic of plagiarism in games. There are a few examples I know of. Some are for sure a conscious decision to rip off someone else's work, while others may be attempts at homages that crossed the line of paying respect to the original work and instead straight up stealing the ideas. I'm going to start with some of the most egregious examples that I know of, and if anyone else has more, feel free to share them here.

zxdtmiegm4kfzatkjb00.png

We've all seen this by now, I'm sure.


For my money, one of the worst offenders has to be SNK (or Eolith, depending on when you are talking about). I'll start out with a couple that a lot of you have probably heard of. The most famous example is the character of k9999 (pronounced "K four 9". The blame for this one is definitely on Eolith) This character seems like it's meant to be a homage to the character of Tetsuo in the film Akira. Here's an example of all the comparisons:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsqK9LWVHNY
k9999-crazyarm.gif


If you'll notice, they even went as far as to hire Tetsuo's voice actor for the character. And then they hired the voice actor of Tetsuo's rival Kaneda, as the voice of K9999's rival Kusanagi. This allowed them to play up the Tetsuo spoof even further. In any case, they obviously went too far with this one, and after King of Fighters 2002, the character has been replaced by the less blatant, "Nameless".
nameless-stance.gif


Now on to SNK music. This example is also pretty well known. This is a comparison of the tune for the Ikari team in King of Fighters '94 contrasted with the Faith No More song, "Surprise, you're dead!" Maybe you could say this one is a coincidence. I'm not sure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0axSMCi4pMQ

However, this next example I'm pretty sure is a straight up rip off. I'm surprised that I've never heard anyone draw the connection before because I've been noticing it for years. I've googled this and come up with no other examples of people noting the similarity. Am I the only one who noticed it? I believe that the character of k9999 is not the first example of SNK ripping off Akira. I'm pretty sure that they had done it before way back in the soundtrack for King of Fighters 97.

I've made this video to submit my case. Please watch and see if you agree:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDA919naMSA
Pretty blatant, I think.

Anyways, those are just some examples I've come across. Now let's hear some others that have come up over the years from you fine folks!
 
K

komplanen

Member
Limbo of the Lost (Wikipedia link) from a few years back was the absolute pinnacle of asset theft. It got canned in the final moments but there's a Let's Play on Youtube for people who are interested.
 
R

Ragnorok64

Member
I never considered K9999 to be plagiarism. It's say he falls heavily into homage territory.

Man there was a jank point and click adventure game that was like the king of plagiarism but I can't remember its name at all.


Edit: Oh yeah, it was Limbo of the Lost I was thinking of.
 
R

Rodney McKay

Member
Didn't a Bioware artist just sketch over a Google Image photo of a woman to make the unmasked Tali photo in Mass Effect 3?

Not sure if that was plagiarism or if the image was available to use that way though.

EDIT: apparently it was available for commercial usage, so no plagarism. Still super lazy, especially for revealing something as big as what the Quarian's look like under their masks.
 
M

mollipen

Member
Maligna said:
For my money, one of the worst offenders has to be SNK. I'll start out with a couple that a lot of you have probably heard of. The most famous example is the character of k9999 (pronounced "K four 9")
Click to expand...

You mean Eolith, not SNK. Not saying SNK didn't do a lot of homages, but Eolith was responsible for some especially notable ones being added to KOF.
 
A

Arkeband

Banned
FFXIV recently had a tiff with Powerman 5000 because the Sephirot the Fiend battle music sounds a lot like "when worlds collide", that song from THPS2 that you could never get out of your head.

It's not the same song, but pretty much everyone I knew was commenting on it before Powerman even got around to commenting on it, before they faded back into obscurity because if we start listening to what they have to say, we'll be hearing from Eiffel 65 next and no one wants that.

When Worlds Collide - http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lsV500W4BHU
Sephirot (no, not Sephiroth) - http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdV_bzJgRxE
 
L

lazygecko

Member
SNK had a boner for Akira as far back as their shmup Last Resort. The background for the first stage was a pretty blatant pixelart recreation of the iconic cyberpunk skyline.

tumblr_mskistqdmp1s7eonpa9.gif


Then there's the Japan stage in KOF94 where it looks like the second layer of the city background is flat out a photograph straight from the film.

kof94-japangtq3r.gif


1b05a72b188eb9b39e4c38hon6.jpg
 
S

SlipperyFishes

Banned
Rodney McKay said:
Didn't a Bioware artist just sketch over a Google Image photo of a woman to make the unmasked Tali photo in Mass Effect 3?

Not sure if that was plagiarism or if the image was available to use that way though.
Click to expand...
That was a piece of photography from a stock images site. They likely used as the basis for their edit and we're happy enough with the minimal effort result. I mean most images are based off something used as a reference guide.
 
F

Falk

that puzzling face
Maligna said:
I've made this video to submit my case. Please watch and see if you agree:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDA919naMSA
Pretty blatant, I think.
Click to expand...

Welcome to the wonderful world of loops and loop libraries.

Most likely both soundtracks used stuff out of a gamelan loop library.

Check out demo 10 of this, for example. I'm not about to drop $50 on it just to find out, but I'd be more than 50% positive that exact loop is in there somewhere.

Granted, it may very well be that it's an intentional 'ha, look at this Akira loop usage, we know how to get that exact sound too', but it's a little different from 'plagiarism' per-se when everything comes out of a can to begin with.
 
W

Wulfram

Member
Rodney McKay said:
Didn't a Bioware artist just sketch over a Google Image photo of a woman to make the unmasked Tali photo in Mass Effect 3?

Not sure if that was plagiarism or if the image was available to use that way though.
Click to expand...

It was a stock image, so no plagiarism.

Some of the NWN portraits were traced from photos of celebrities and had to be replaced via a patch, though.

latest
latest
 
D

DorkyMohr

Banned
UnemployedVillain said:
I didn't even know you had to get to rights to use a public city map
Click to expand...

It wasn't a map made by the city. It was made by some subway map enthusiast who was very vocal when he found out that ND used his work. Even described himself as having twitter alerts for subway map related tweets.
 
P

PSqueak

Banned
Super Robot Wars K Plagirized a song form Warcraft 2 and the Magus theme from Chrono trigger, Banpresto and Bandai/Namco apologuised to Square, but Blizzard? as far as i know they never acknowledged nor apologuised to them and went as far as reusing the Warcraft song in Super Robot Wars W.
 
M

Maligna

Banned
shidoshi said:
You mean Eolith, not SNK. Not saying SNK didn't do a lot of homages, but Eolith was responsible for some especially notable ones being added to KOF.
Click to expand...

Ah, you're right. I'll edit. Although they were SNK in 1997 when they ripped off Akira's music. Also the possible Faith No More rip off. (See the video examples above)
 
L

lazygecko

Member
Falk said:
Welcome to the wonderful world of loops and loop libraries.

Most likely both soundtracks used stuff out of a gamelan loop library.

Check out demo 10 of this, for example. I'm not about to drop $50 on it just to find out, but I'd be more than 50% positive that exact loop is in there somewhere.
Click to expand...

There's a music/sample library called Heart of Asia or something which has a pre-recorded flute melody which was used fucking everywhere in western video games featuring Asian elements in the 00's. C&C Generals and Battlefield 2 are two examples.
 
M

mollipen

Member
mindsale said:
The box art for the Wii version of Okami was watermarked IGN. It was an image they'd put up.
Click to expand...

That's not plagiarism. Capcom owned the rights to the original image, because it was theirs. Someone at the company was just stupid and grabbed it off of Google Images or something instead of their internal asset archive.
 
R

Rodney McKay

Member
planetsmasherx1 said:
That was a piece of photography from a stock images site. They likely used as the basis for their edit and we're happy enough with the minimal effort result. I mean most images are based off something used as a reference guide.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I read online that it was from a commercial stock photo site.

I just remember that most people being not exactly thrilled with the minimum effort result.
 
B

BosSin

Member
shidoshi said:
That's not plagiarism. Capcom owned the rights to the original image, because it was theirs. Someone at the company was just stupid and grabbed it off of Google Images or something instead of their internal asset archive.
Click to expand...

Yeah, it's more like pure laziness
 
F

Falk

that puzzling face
lazygecko said:
There's a music/sample library called Heart of Asia or something which has a pre-recorded flute melody which was used fucking everywhere in western video games featuring Asian elements in the 00's. C&C Generals and Battlefield 2 are two examples.
Click to expand...

If you're really interested in this kind of stuff, this is a really good/eye-opening read

http://vgmdb.net/forums/showthread.php?t=11231

Tangential, but I'll say very cryptically that a particular percussion loop is used in both Kingdom Hearts and D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die. Cracked me up when I recognized it.
 
L

lazygecko

Member
Wulfram said:
It was a stock image, so no plagiarism.

Some of the NWN portraits were traced from photos of celebrities and had to be replaced via a patch, though.

latest
latest
Click to expand...

Haha. Too bad comic book artists can't patch their work.

Tracing examples like that strike me as fairly innocent from a legal point of view though and should be easy to get away with. In the age of pre-digital hand drawn game box art, blatant tracing of works from people like Frank Frazetta was also extremly common and nobody really raised a fuzz.
 
Vlaphor

Vlaphor

Member
Check out "Tracing the influence" from Hardcoregaming101 for a ton of this stuff.
I'd post some examples but I'm on my phone
 
C

Cels

Member
So Naughty Dog has stolen artists' work at least twice now, you'd think they'd learn after stealing the artist's redesigned subway map in The Last of Us, but they stole Ubisoft's art in a trailer for Uncharted 4. Shame on Naughty Dog.
 
U

UnemployedVillain

Member
planetsmasherx1 said:
That wasn't a public map. That was a piece of art owned by a private individual, not the city.
Click to expand...

DorkyMohr said:
It wasn't a map made by the city. It was made by some subway map enthusiast who was very vocal when he found out that ND used his work. Even described himself as having twitter alerts for subway map related tweets.
Click to expand...

shagg_187 said:
That's because it's not the actual public city map, and a redesign done by an artist.
Click to expand...

Oh shit, I completely didn't see that. Well, I read the article, but I assumed the guy was contracted by the city. I didn't notice the Red Lin didn't actually match the official MBTA one (despite seeing it almost every day for the last 7+ years)
 
M

MMarston

Was getting caught part of your plan?
komplanen said:
Limbo of the Lost (Wikipedia link) from a few years back was the absolute pinnacle of asset theft. It got canned in the final moments but there's a Let's Play on Youtube for people who are interested.
Click to expand...

Seriously, this is pretty much the definitive example for this thread.


It's pretty unbeatable in terms of plagiarism.
 
P

PSqueak

Banned
RedToad64 said:
Didn't Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing use fan art in one of the casino levels?
Click to expand...

Only in the PC version, it has been long patched out.

Also, cross posting from the kof 14 thread:

UOLDOEM.jpg


(From Kinnikuman)

StOEoTm.jpg


(From World heroes, several DECADES later)
Click to expand...

Brocken was an unapologetic ripoff of the Kinnikuman character and appeared in a game called "World Heroes" where he fought heroes from around the world in a tournament, while in the Kinnikuman universe "Chojin" (the in universe term for super hero) fought in a huge world tournament for expectacle and glory.
 
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