A guide to the fascinating legal history of the videogame industry, written for nonlawyers.
Why did a judge recall
FIFA 15
, a nonviolent soccer game, from French shelves in 2014? Why was
Vodka Drunkenski
, a character in Nintendo-Japan’s
Punch-Out!
, renamed
Soda Popinski
in the US and then in Western Europe, where the pun made no sense? Why was a Dutch-American company barred by US courts from distributing a clone of
Pac-Man
? Julien Mailland answers all these questions and more in
The Game That Never Ends
, an inside look at the legal history that undergirds our favorite videogames. Drawing on a series of case studies as vignettes of the human comedy, Mailland sheds light on why and how the role of lawyers is key for understanding the videogame industry.
Each chapter in
is a mini-puzzle that pieces together how an important legal issue arose, was resolved, and impacted the industry and the experience of gamers in real time. These chapters are interspersed with shorter chapters called “The Lawyer’s Corner,” opportunities to dive deeper into individual cases. Lightly footnoted, these interludes connect the previous chapters together by providing a conceptual meta-analysis. Offering a comprehensive overview of the global legal history of videogames,
will leave readers with a nuanced, in-depth, and more global understanding of the videogame industry.