Lately we have seen a big media blitz from the big content peeps crying over all their lost revenue due to the p-word. It seems some people believe that if you repeat a given statement enough times it can somehow be turned into a true fact. To that I say one thing: grow up and be adults, falsehood is a lie and nothing you can do is going to make your stats real.
Anyways, I came across this recently: En.wikipedia.org - Gravity_gun and I got to thinking about design ideas and such.
This is really what gets my goat - take any big content provider as an example. If you step on their toes and use their content (for almost anything - even legitimate uses) and get press, they have major coniptions. If you sample their content, use it in an unflattering manner, build it into some other work of art, make a parody, really any number of things they act like spoiled children. Well, spoiled children with millions or billions of dollars and expert legal advice.
These organizations use monetary pressures, legal notices, DCMA takedowns and all manner of chicanery to stop what is often a _single_ individual whom in no way is harming the organization!
And yet...how often do they take the time to give credit to the true owners of the ideas that make them wealthy? Or, how many times have we re-invented the wheel.
As these thoughts percolated through the old gray matter I thought I would give some credit to the originators of some current popular game ideas...
(Now I'm not implying the current creators of the portal gun / gravity gun are one of the bad orgs. This is just a really good example of how ideas are spawned, traded around, and re-invented.)
Shown here: Moddb.com - harpoon-in-action --- painkeep ( Moddb.com - painkeep-source-update) harpoon retrieving a quad damage, possibly right out from under another player. In a way this is an early gravity gun concept excepting that it didn't throw things. It could pull the player anywhere you could stick it, it had a length limit and it pulled objects to the player.
That isn't nearly as "borrowed idea" as the next one!
Shown here: Moddb.com - portal-gun-demo --- a video of quake 1's original single player goal completed with a quake c mod found here: Gamers.org - portal10.zip
What you can watch at that link is the quake 1 portal gun, with a release date (both on the ftp site and in the archive and pak file) of 4-1-1997. Thats right, 1997. There is one operation difference with the more modern portal gun - this is a fire once device that attempts to "burrow" a straight line through whatever "solid" and open an escape portal into any "open" map space found. It is not a big leap to the fire twice device found in "portal".
I can only wonder if this was in mind (conscious or not) when the big game was being designed. If it was, this guy deserves some credit - Author : Howard Roy. Good going, Howard, you lent an idea to some design studio for what is most likely a multi-million dollar game...I wonder if they gave you any credit? (or even a thought.)
