One of the best games of 2014 will not be appearing on any other formats, as Jeff Minter is accused by Atari of stealing his own work.
TxK will not be coming to PC or PlayStation 4, with British programming legend Jeff Minter being force to abandon his plans to support Oculus Rift and other VR headsets.
In a series of angry tweets Minter has accused Atari of being a ‘copyright troll’, describing in a forum post how Atari claimed he must have ‘stolen secrets from Atari’s source code in order to steal the work of the other people who worked on Tempest 2000′ to make TxK.
Except… Minter is the original creator of Tempest 2000.
Tempest 2000 is an update of golden age coin-op Tempest, which Minter did not make, but Atari’s complaints don’t seem to relate to the original game.
As Minter points out Atari have never attempted to use the brand in anything substantial since and they don’t seem to have any problem with the numerous other Tempest clones that litter the Apple and Android app stores.
But Atari are no longer the same company that helped to kick start the games industry back in the 1970s, with Minter likening it to being ‘savaged by its undead corpse’.
Versions of TxK were being planned for PlayStation 4, PC, Android, and VR helmets Oculus Rift and GearVR, but they now look like they won’t happen.
In fact there might be a real danger that TxK could be withdrawn from the PlayStation Store as a result of this, so we’d highly recommend downloading it now before it’s too late. Here’s our original review from last year.
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