Sorry about the slow week again…I do have a big update on an indie game that we covered recently, but am waiting for one last piece of important info before going to wire on that one. Otherwise, it’s been pretty quiet on the arcade front this week.
Ms. Pac-Man In Court
I thought about making this a full post as it was the only other piece of arcade related news this week apart form Battle Bowling, but I guess here is as good a place as any. At the beginning of the week, Bandai Namco sued AtGames (creators of various classic game console emulator’s you’ve probably seen in stores like many of the Atari Flashback iterations, some of the Sega Genesis iterations) for infringing on the Ms. Pac-Man IP. Then later this week, AtGames issued a press release stating that they acquired the rights to Ms. Pac-man from General Computing Corporation (GCC). Turns out that it’s a little more nuanced than that; Namco owns the copyright to the character and game, but GCC held the rights to royalties for use of MPM, due to them creating the character as a Pac-Man hack back in 1982, and getting a pretty sweet/rare legal setup with rights to the royalties. AtGames bought those rights from GCC(before the lawsuit was filed), but Namco is alleging that AtGames has infringed on the IP. It also didn’t help AtGames that Walgreens also filed suit against the company this week too.
Overall, the rights to MPM have long been a little bit of a mess, which is why you’ve not really seen the IP show up very often, since Namco would have to pay GCC royalties. I’m sure they are chomping at the bit to get those rights from AtGames, but it’ll probably be a court fight that will take

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