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26, 2011, Apple contacted us to let us know Atari claims infringement. The talks only happened in late 2011 after Black Powder Media had acquired the Vector Tanks rights from Hirschberg, who is now working as a programmer for Electronic Arts.īlack Powder Media’s Scott Barrett recalls the communication, which even included Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell at one point: “On Oct. It’s not necessarily one of the giant companies that can throw its legal muscle around, and, because of its smaller size, it actually needs to tap outside developers to do a lot of work.īut nobody ever spoke to Hirschberg when he originally reached out to Atari in 2009. In the case of Vector Tanks, we spoke with the team on a number of occasions over a period of several months and ultimately determined that it was not a good solution for our Battlezone franchise.”Ītari, in fact, is much smaller than it used to be and, after a number of asset sales and restructurings, has about 50 employees and a relatively small legal department. Unfortunately not all games that are brought to us meet the innovation standards that our consumers expect. Both Asteroids: Gunner and Breakout: Boost are the first of several products from that strategy. Every time I found myself steering into Battlezone territory I would purposely turn the other way.”Īsked by VentureBeat about the situation, Atari issued this statement: “Working with the independent developer community is at the heart of Atari’s mobile business model. That’s why I put jeeps in there, helicopters and power-ups – it was not supposed to be Battlezone. Hirschberg said that he wanted Vector Tanks to be evocative of the 1980 Battlezone arcade game, but deliberately avoided making it a straight clone: “I used to say: They can’t come after me for a game of tanks drawn of lines, because that was the only similarity that I saw. Three top investment pros open up about what it takes to get your video game funded.