While watching the gameplay trailers for Capcom’s upcoming iPhone game MaXplosion, it looks like it should be a fun little game. There’s this neat exploding mechanic, you see, which your character can do 3 times in a row before needing a recharge. You use this mechanic to traverse standard platforming levels, blowing apart enemies foolish enough to stand in your way.
Of course there’s just this one niggling little problem. This game, a game wrapped entirely around one mechanic, was released in the summer of ’09.
To say this game resembles Twisted Pixel’s wildly popular and frenetically paced ‘Splosion Man is an understatement… there is no way the planning meeting for this game did not include the phrase “Just go make ‘Splosion Man.”
It gets worse too, as Twisted Pixel CEO Michael Wilford responded on his twitter page:
Best part is, we originally pitched @Splosion_Man to Capcom and they said no.
It’s rare to see anything truly original in modern gaming. Games borrow from one another all the time, and when something works it’s bound to get copied in some capacity. But it is rare to see a major developer unapologetically ripping off a well-known indie game in this way. Hopefully it sells well, and Twisted Pixel nets all the profits when the inevitable lawsuit is resolved.
UPDATE: Guess that lawsuit may not be so inevitable after all. Michael Wilford spoke with Joystiq this evening and shrugged off the idea of filing suit against Capcom:
“While I think the similarities are pretty nauseating, we’re too small to take on a company like Capcom,” said Wilford.
That, and we owe them one for inventing Mega Man, so we’ll let them slide. I just hope they’re not counting on the fact that indies can’t fight back. In general, anything that would take our focus off of making games would be a bad decision, I think. We just need to keep our heads down making the next thing so that Capcom has something to steal next year.”
