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One thing that I can't stand is blatant plagiarism! And one group of items has been more blatantly plagiarised more than most are Spectrum games. Being the natural fountain of originality that they are (in most cases), today's software houses with a terminal case of programmers-block, like nothing better than to get out their trusty rubber key, load up an old classic and then try and convert it to the latest mega-computer fad, stopping briefly on the way to maybe improve the graphics. So I am here with my Roger Cook hat on to expose this seedy trade and put them under the spotlight.
Our first suspect is a copy of Dungeon Master for the Atari ST, probably the best example yet of Blatant Plagiarism. How the computer world raved when it came out, announcing it as unlike anything ever seen before. Well, that only applies to a man who has been living inside a paper bag for 7 years; to us True Spectrum Users, it was a blatant copy of that excellent old Quicksilva game Dragonsbane! Quicksilva's legal dept must have been half asleep not to spot that multi-million pound money-spinning lawsuit a mile off.
Flying 3D shoot'em-ups were not that common on the Spectrum. Of the few that I can think of (Dark Star, Star Wars, 3D Star Strike) one that didn't have the word "Star" in the title was 3D Tunnel, an altogether different game with some excellent ideas - and it seems Descent's programmer agreed with me. Okay, I'm sure that you'll all spot the moderately improved graphics on the PC (and if you've got a Pentium you'll even get to see them moving at a half-descent (sic) speed), but I reckon that if the Spectrum was capable of producing goraud-shaded wire-framed texture-mapped graphics in 1984, then 3D Tunnel's authors would no doubt have produced a game 10 years ahead of it's time.
Next is Doom - it's just Catch 23, with (as all games mentioned here) improved graphics. Having never actually played Catch 23, I am giving a completely uninformed opinion here, but that never stopped Crash, eh? (only kidding, Crash was okay (I suppose - you can take that gun from my head now)). But it seems to me that Catch 23 is a walking and shooting game. Doom is a walking and shooting game. Being able to see the walls from more than just the wire-framed edges never really improved it that much, but the blood, gore and weapons did.
Arkanoid, another guilty game, did appear on the Spectrum so I did consider sparing it from a tirade of four letter words, but let us not forget that it was a coin-op conversion from Taito (I think), so let's have a pop at their programmers and spare Imagine's. So Arkanoid's original programmer must have just popped the Horizons tape into the cassette player, tapped their fingers for five minutes, and then started playing Thro' the Wall. Knowing a great idea (but also knowing about things like copyright law), they resorted to that most trusted friend on improving a game - power-up's, in the same way that Street Fighter 2 depending on Special Moves to differentiate itself from Way of the Exploding Fist.
And finally, scraping the bottom of the barrel and running desperate for ideas, under the spotlight in this paragraph is virtually every flight simulator ever written after Flight Simulation and Fighter Pilot. Knights of the Sky? F14-Tomcat Fleet Defender? The list is endless, and they all owe something to these two fine examples of the genre. kay, so anybody would prefer to play Knights of the Sky rather than Flight Simulation, but that's only because there's no shooting in Flight Simulation. When I was a lad, and this was all fields, we had to make do with aerobatics and navigation...
So what say we all band together and take these scourges of the software world to court and then to the cleaners? No, we'll spare them the embarassing court cases (and hope they spare us for passing round snapshots like it's going out of fashion).
"Spectrum users load before they shoot."