The long-standing dispute between Interplay and Bethesda over the Fallout brand is back in the news. It’s a pretty complicated mess, but the short version is that Interplay sold the brand to Bethesda, then later repurchased the rights to use it in their own Fallout Online MMO. A whole lot of squabbling about what exactly they’re entitled to use then ensued.
Towards the end of last year, Bethesda claimed they’d sold only the rights to the Fallout name, withholding the rights to any of the brand’s locations, storylines, characters and iconography, such as the ‘PIP Boy’ – restrictions which Interplay deemed “absurd”.
Now a new filing by Interplay counter-claims that, as early as 2007, an agreement had been made to license more than just the name.
“For at least four years, Bethesda has known that Interplay interpreted its right to create the Fallout-branded MMOG to include copyrighted content from the Fallout universe in order to make the MMOG a recognisable Fallout game,” reads the new filing.
And then he said that she’d told him that he’d heard that someone told somebody else that they saw him talking to her behind the bicycle shed last Friday. Work it out, kids.
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