Irem's UniWar S ripped off Galaxian code

vbrooks

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I was looking at a dump of the UniWar S ROMs a noticed a lot of identical code and data between it and Galaxian. I knew that UniWar S ran on Galaxian hardware but Irem clearly disassembled Galaxian and used it as a basis for UniWar S. I'm surprised that Irem who went on to produce such classics as Moon Patrol and R-Type did this without permission. Usually this sort of thing was done to make enhancement kits for existing games though there are other cases where companies used code without permission to make new games like the Piranha and Mayday (both of which got pulled due to infringement).
 
I'm not terribly surprised. Just think of how many companies got into making video games by making blatant Pong clones. Galaxian itself is a riff on Space Invaders — maybe it didn't lift actual code, but many of the early shooters were heavily influenced by it.
 
I'm not terribly surprised. Just think of how many companies got into making video games by making blatant Pong clones. Galaxian itself is a riff on Space Invaders — maybe it didn't lift actual code, but many of the early shooters were heavily influenced by it.

Galaxian is very different hardware (and thus software) from Space Invaders. Space Invaders uses monochrome bitmapped graphics while Galaxian uses color tile/sprite graphics so it is a completely original development.

UniWar S is such a blatant ripoff of the Galaxian code that if you go into service mode your ship is still referred to as "Galaxip" - they should have at least changed that. Heck even the internal RAM usage is the same, for example in both games the current high score is at 40A8h for 3 bytes. Granted a game like Piranha which blatantly ripped off Pac-Man is worse but that was done by some fly-by-night company. I'm surprised because a company like Irem did this and UniWar S looks like an original game with obvious differences from Galaxian.
 
I'm surprised Namco never went after Irem over that. Yes, Galaxian is the same type of game as Space Invaders, but just as influential (and probably pirated more).
 
I'm not surprised in the least. Irem started out by creating rip-off clones of Space Invaders. They didn't create a legit game until Moon Patrol in '82.
Blatant stealing of hardware/software was commonplace in the beginning. It took a few court cases to curb that practice.
 
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Galaxian is very different hardware (and thus software) from Space Invaders. Space Invaders uses monochrome bitmapped graphics while Galaxian uses color tile/sprite graphics so it is a completely original development.

UniWar S is such a blatant ripoff of the Galaxian code that if you go into service mode your ship is still referred to as "Galaxip" - they should have at least changed that. Heck even the internal RAM usage is the same, for example in both games the current high score is at 40A8h for 3 bytes. Granted a game like Piranha which blatantly ripped off Pac-Man is worse but that was done by some fly-by-night company. I'm surprised because a company like Irem did this and UniWar S looks like an original game with obvious differences from Galaxian.

I could be wrong but I believe my UniWar S dedicated cabinet has a very modified Galaxian board that plays UniWar S. But yeah, IREM ripped them off for sure...





Here are some photo's of a pretty rare dedicated game
 
I'm not surprised in the least. Irem started out by creating rip-off clones of Space Invaders. They didn't create a legit game until Moon Patrol in '82.
Blatant stealing of hardware/software was commonplace in the beginning. It took a few court cases to curb that practice.

IPM Invader at least used different hardware from Space Invaders though it was still a very obvious ripoff. Space Invaders used a 8080 CPU and monochrome bitmapped graphics while IPM Invader used a 6502 CPU and color tile graphics.

They might have created a few original (but unmemorable) games prior to Moon Patrol, see Andromeda here - http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=734 - it may be just another Galaxian-style game but it's uncertain from the pictures.

I could be wrong but I believe my UniWar S dedicated cabinet has a very modified Galaxian board that plays UniWar S. But yeah, IREM ripped them off for sure...

The modifications from Galaxian are to support additional ROMs, the basic hardware is identical.

Piranha (by "GL" whoever they were) also had a dedicated cabinet but was definitely a blatant and obvious ripoff of Pac-Man (and a poor one at that). I believe Namco dragged them to court and won because they had a hidden easter egg in Pac-Man which displays "MADE BY NAMCO" in large letters if you do a specific sequence in service mode. It's fairly certain they started adding hidden easter eggs to their games because of all the Galaxian ripoffs.
 
Galaxian is very different hardware (and thus software) from Space Invaders. Space Invaders uses monochrome bitmapped graphics while Galaxian uses color tile/sprite graphics so it is a completely original development.

UniWar S is such a blatant ripoff of the Galaxian code that if you go into service mode your ship is still referred to as "Galaxip" - they should have at least changed that. Heck even the internal RAM usage is the same, for example in both games the current high score is at 40A8h for 3 bytes. Granted a game like Piranha which blatantly ripped off Pac-Man is worse but that was done by some fly-by-night company. I'm surprised because a company like Irem did this and UniWar S looks like an original game with obvious differences from Galaxian.

I'm aware of the differences in the games and not sure why you're repeating my point back to me. The industry has a long history of ripping games off (both ideas and actual hardware/software), going all the way back to Computer Space and Pong.

It wasn't just fly-by-night companies ripping off games, established players like Midway and Chicago coin entered the market with blatant Pong clones. Any number of companies got their start by ripping off Pong: Cinematronics, Exidy, Zaccaria, and Meadows, to name a few.
 
It always seemed to be that Exidy ripped off most of their black and white titles from other manufacturers.
 
Were the boards copies too? I assume that would be pretty blatant.

Also, I'm not sure that in 1980 it was well established that software could be copyrighted.
 
There usually weren't copyright dates displayed on the screen on games before 1980, but there were copyrights right on the monitor bezels or marquees (or sometimes on a sticker on the monitor) well before 1980.

This article talks a bit about copyrights and video games:
http://www.flhlaw.com/files/uploads/documents/gaming the system.pdf
 
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