I authored a Windows shareware game in the early 90's that involved spaceships shooting rocks and flying saucers. It had a number of neat features, including ra

I authored a Windows shareware game in the early 90's that involved spaceships shooting rocks and flying saucers. It had a number of neat features, including ray-traced sprites, multiplayer, a tournament mode, customizable ships, and so on. This eventually led to a legal setting where I had to answer questions like "is it true that when you shoot a large rock it splits into two medium sized rocks". The answer to the above question is yes, for more than one game. However, if I asked the question "is it true that you press Left and Right to rotate, Thrust to accelerate, Fire to shoot, and Hyperspace to jump to a random position on the screen", the answer would also be yes, for more than one game (Spacewar, 1962 would be one correct answer). It'd be a sad world where my game didn't exist, because there was no one willing to make that exact game for 16-bit Windows in 1991. It would also be a sad world where we never went beyond Spacewar on the PDP-1. This particular sword cuts both ways. As a fan of creating and not a fan of litigating, I'd rather err on the side of more and better games, rather than lock up ideas for decades with copyright law. Pandemic 2.5 seems to have done well and is even going back up the charts. For games, doesn't a rising tide lift all boats?