Patent concerns

[Johannes]

> On Wed, 2008-01-16 at 21:50 +0100, Hans de Goede wrote:
> > Matthew Miller wrote:
> > > On Wed, Jan 16, 2008 at 02:46:02PM -0500, Tom spot Callaway wrote:
> > >> Due to patent concerns, we won't be able to include any games in Fedora
> > >> which meet the following criteria:
> > >> A game where "targets" move across the screen to a predetermined point
> > >> or line, where the player hits a button/key/mouse click as the target(s)
> > >> crosses that point or line, and gets points.
> > > 
> > > Seriously? I wrote an AppleBasic game in fourth grade (1984) that did that.
> > > 
> > 
> > I hear you, some smartass behind DDR though so game mechanics can't be 
> > copyrighted, lets patent them.
> > 
> > Cheesh.
> > 
> > Maybe its an idea to petition pubpat: http://www.pubpat.org/ to fight this? I 
> > know they have much bigger (and much more important) fish to catch, but this 
> > seems trivially easy to overthrow.
> 
> If you're motivated to find the prior art, feel free.


>From the top of my head, Moon Buggy. If you haven't seen it, here's a
quick description: You can see the left side of a (moon) buggy on the
right side of the screen and a (moon) surface underneath with pits in
it that moves from left to right. You control the buggy and have to
jump over the holes (you can't move left or right, you can just jump).
So: you have "targets" (pits) that move across the screen and you have
a predetermined point (buggy) where you have to press a button, so a
fine piece of prior art if you ask me. It's not very old (Version 1 was
released in 2004), but it has some ancestry: it's based on a 1982 game
"Moon Patrol" which, based on screenshots, seems to be quite similar.

Johannes