Capcom and Data East weren’t the only companies at odds over the idea that another developer may have copied their ideas in a fighting game.
Sega was reportedly considering suing Atari over the 1996 fighting game Fight For Life, which was panned by critics and considered a flop for the Atari Jaguar — but they thought it would be too embarrassing to do so.
In a blog post by Kenji Aoyagi, he explained what happened: “When Virtua Fighter 1 was completed, there was one French person on the staff,” referring to former Sega AM2 staff member, Francois Bertrand.
“And after the game was finished, that person moved on to work at Atari. And then when photographs surfaced of Atari Jaguar’s new software, the Virtua Fighter team was surprised. That’s because it was basically a complete ripoff of Virtua Fighter. The culprit was without a doubt the french man,” Aoyagi wrote.
“The staff instantly started going ‘lawsuit, lawsuit’ and diligently gathered funds to do so and it went all the way to a point where we said ‘Alright, we’re ready to sue at any time!’ but at that point, the animations which obviously wouldn’t have been visible through a photograph were so rough that the feeling became ‘if we sue over something that looks like this, that’ll be more embarrassing for us’ so they apparently dropped the lawsuit,” Aoyagi stated.
“I don’t know how much of it is true, but… well, my friend always said ‘There’s nothing we can do anyway since Atari is protected by CITES’ …” Aoyagi noted, referring to the shorter name for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, also known as the Washington Convention.
For his part, Francois Bertrand freely admits that his time at Sega in Japan had a positive impact on the game, stating “Of course, all the research I did in Japan, was beneficial to help making Fight For Life.”
In terms of why Fight For Life turned out so poorly, Bertrand elaborated on what was happening behind the scenes at Atari in an Arcade Attack interview.
“[Fight For Life] took longer than anticipated to come out, not really due to production issues, but more to the financial state of Atari at the time,” Bertrand said.
“We were almost done, when the company more or less folded overnight, and it took some pushing and pulling to get it finished,” he stated.
Bertrand was then asked if Fight For Life was an unfinished game, and released too early, to which he responded:
“When the company starting to lay off people, while trying to find a suitor, the game was not finished. It was not far off but would have needed a few more months to be even better.
“I was able to negotiate a couple of months (after being laid off myself) to finalize what was finazable [sic]. I could have used five [months], but that’s all I could get. We would have needed that extra time to QA the game a little better, and polish a lot of the things that were still a bit too bare.
“But at that time, it was either that, or not having the game. Some things got cut, just because of lack of time or resources,” Bertrand concluded.
Translations in this story were provided by Nicholas MajinTenshinhan Taylor, spotted via Time Extension.
Source: Event Hubs
