Investigated: Are ‘fangames’ legal?

Imagine that you’ve just spent the last eight years of your life toiling away at a tribute to your favourite game series. You’ve fashioned an exhaustive and comprehensive remake of your most loved game, drawing and coding its 20 characters and 100 stages from scratch.

And then, imagine just days after your labour of love hits the internet, packaged as a free PC download for other like-minded fans to enjoy, the owner of the original game serves you with a cease and desist letter, telling you in no uncertain terms, to pull your decade-long magnum opus from the web, or face the consequences.

That was the crushing story for Spanish coder “Bomber Link”, whose Herculean tribute to Streets of Rage got shut down by Sega’s legal team in April, just days after the eight-year project hit BitTorrent and Rapidshare. But it’s a familiar story to many fans who have had their tributes, remakes and unofficial sequels quashed by game publishers.

Read more at Wired UK