[MUD-Dev] DNA Game Patent [was Randy's Resume]

[Jessica Mulligan]

At 04:33 PM 07/29/01 -0700, Christopher Allen wrote:

> I also vaguely recall from BBS games of the early 80's that
> someone had a series of "door" games where the results of one
> space game would affect the results of a different space game
> played by a different set of players. Does anyone remember
> anything more about that game?

> Does anyone know of any other prior art?

3DO may find this a tough one to defend in court; there seems to be
enough prior art of sufficient similarity to make it a tough sell to
a jury.  Off the top of my head, I can remember another old Apple II
BBS game around the same time as Eamon circa 1984-1987, called
Proving Ground, which was basically three games that allowed the
player to move objects found in one game to the others.  One game
was basically a dungeon crawl, another was a castle invasion game
and the last was called Split Infinity, a combined fantasy and
sci-fi adventure/RPG.

Also, Sega did plenty of work in this general area in the late
1990s, under the moniker of Limited Edition Digital Objects,
although 3DO's patent seems to go a bit farther in the
transformation of objects to new objects corresponding to the game.
Off the top of my head, I don't recall seeing anything exactly like
this, nor any designs or plans for it.  I HAVE seen designs for
Multiverses in which character skills and attributes translate to a
corresponding skill in a different genre, i.e. pistol skill in an
Old West genre that becomes crossbow skill in a fantasy genre.

Note that this patent would only cover moving objects to separate
and new games, much the way Sega envisioned for LIDOs.  Near as my
layman's eye can tell, there would be nothing preventing someone
from designing a multiverse that allowed such transference and
transformation of objects to different settings within the same
persistent game multiverse, for example.

-Jessica Mulligan

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