Game content from history (Legal issues).

News & General Discussion
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Hello, first post here, so I’ll share a bit about myself. I work as a programmer for a living and have 5 years of experience in the industry (Mostly web development). Recently I have been very interested in game development and have had my fair share of trials with frameworks, engines, etc along with previous college experience. In the past I have worked with things like OpenGL, SDL, Ogre3D, SFML, XNA, PyGame, etc. When I ran across Unity, I was amazed with the power it provided. So lately I have been working with Unity/Blender in terms of game development.

My question is regarding game content, I understand that copying content from other games is illegal, but what about ideas from history? For example if I were to use a mythological creature from ancient Greece or a name of a city from ancient China, would that be ok?

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Nobody can copyright history. :wink: (Although that probably won’t stop somebody from trying…)

–Eric

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Thanks Eric, though I agree with you, I would not be surprised if big companies try/tried to do that.

The reason why I ask this is because I’m mostly interested in RPG games, and I feel like when it comes to story and game content, ancient history is pretty rich in that respect.

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All that stuff would be in the public domain , like you can even do a game on Chinese mythology if you wanted to . What you can’t do is base something off another person’s story based on history . Greek mythology , for example, has a wide varitiy of characters , but if didn’t have Kartos ( god of war) , so you can’t make a game where you play as or fight , or see Kartos .

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Except apparently the Olympics™®©. :wink:

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When it comes to story and game content, the human imagination is pretty rich in that respect…

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Can you explain this further. Who is Kartos and why can’t you use him in your game?
So are you saying you could use Zeus, but not Kartos? I assume Kartos is a character in some show?

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Kratos…not Kartos. The game, “God of War”…had Kratos instead of Ares.

I believe he was saying you can’t base your game off of somebody else’s fictional adjustments to history.

You could have Ares, but not Kratos…etc.

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But Kratos is from mythology aswell?

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Yep… so that leaves me still confuzzed

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But he was not God of War. You could run into issues using him as God of War. You could use him as he was noted in history…you could even fictionalize him - but if you fictionalized him in the same was as Sony…Mr. Tretton might jump you in an alley and bludgeon you with a Vita.

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You could still have Kratos, just don’t depict him in the same way God of War does. Make him your own character.

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Yes, but influences sure help. I’m not saying copying an exact historical story here unless that was the intend of the game, but rather use characters/cities and shape them around your story.

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I think you’re going to be okay (not that what I think is anything you should care about in the least), but what you said there:

“shape them around your story”

Rather than “shape your story around them”… yep, I think you’re going to be okay.

Unless you’re specifically looking to do a recreation, one can do wonders by making even minor changes to history for a story.