Read this on BluesNews today… There are plenty of games that have used sanity in them before this patent. Isn’t there some sort of rule that something can’t be patented if it already existed and can be proven?

First the music industry will fall because they can’t keep people from stealing music.  The patent industry will be next.  As information becomes more and more available even intellectual property rights can’t be granted.  It almost seems that there is something ingrained in people that property=theft.  There may be hope for communism yet.

I hate it when people patent ideas. It is so bad for the pread of any sort of knowledge. Humans will never progress in the huge leaps they did before if people are trying to copy right their ideas.

Cheers BunBun

This is an interesting question, which pushes the limits of my understanding of “prior art.”

The idea of “sanity point loss” was used in RPG’s by Chaosium somewhere between 1981 and 1986--so the idea of losing sanity points as a game mechanism certainly doesn’t belong to Nintendo, and certainly not in 2005.

I guess it comes down to whether the medium change from pen-and-paper to computer-based gaming mechanics is somehow a new direction of the “art”, or just a redux of something that is already well established.

The question is further complicated if Chaosium could challenge the patent on the grounds that it violates their copyright because it’s considered a “derivate work”.

I’ve frequently advocated the complete destruction of copyright, in a phased manner—the start of which would be a conclusion of any additional awards of pattents within a 1 year time upon legislative passage.

A product, if of true quality, can survive competition, replication, and monopoly.  Consider an economic darwinist, survival-of-the-most-fit, approach to new products.  It’d be amazing what new, totally original ideas would surface, literally over night.  It would also promote true cottage-industry, very conducive to contemporary technology and markets.

There are plenty of games that have used sanity in them before this patent.

Wouldn’t “Call of Cthulu” be one of them?

That may be, but as we all know, the patent office doesn’t take prior art into account when deciding on awarding patents.

The obvious game in reference is Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, released in 2002 by then Nintendo second-party developer Silicon Knights. It’s one of my favorite games of all time, and the Insanity Effect is used with sheer brilliance.

I’m an absolute Nintendo groupie, but this is just another in a long list of stupid things it’s done.

That and almost everying in Eternal Darkness was ripped straight out of Lovecraft’s fiction (Cthulu). 

I wonder what this’ll mean for that Call of Cthulu game in development (it should be near completion by now), it had a sanity mechanic as any Lovecraft based game should. 

I hope it doesn’t get scrapped, it looked damn cool.