this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2024
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I agree that it's all original code and art, I would even say that he's well within his right to post his clone since there doesn't seem to be any copyright-able IP he could be infringing on.
But I wholly disagree with the notion that "if the game was copied that quickly there wasn't much substance there to begin with". There are limitless examples of world changing inventions that were trivial to build, but no one had thought to do it, and the same goes for art. The difficulty of making something isn't what makes it genius, in fact it's usually the simplicity of a genius idea that makes people go "damn, why didn't I think of that, it's so genius!"
It sounds like this guy accomplished little more than burning the few bridges he had, and dragging his own name through the mud. Just...not a smart move.
Could you please give some examples of this? I'd love to know more.
A lot of stationary: paper clips, staples, pencils, sticky notes
A lot of toys: yoyo, slinky, hula hoop, Play-Doh, crayons
Packaging: cardboard box, plastic bottles, plastic bottles with the lid on the bottom, aluminum cans
You use inventions all the time that you could probably just build from home now that you know what they are. But there's nothing that says you/we are already aware of every simple invention. Just think about all the simple, yet revolutionary ideas no one has thought of yet....and if you can do that, you'll be a billionaire.
But games and art aren't exactly like that. People train by copying great art, and code and games especially are iterative. It's not like he took a super useful thing and made millions by claiming he invented it. He took a game, made a clone and added features, admitting it was a clone. Like snake and pong and brickbreaker.
I wouldn't consider any of those to be trivial to build though.
Ok.
Not the person you initially asked, but a good one is Eli Whitney's cotton gin that made separating the cotton fiber from the seeds much easier. It had traditionally been done by hand, which is very time consuming. Whitney's invention greatly simplified the process and made cotton farming much more economically viable as an industry, ultimately leading to an extreme expansion in chattel slavery in the Southern United States and serving to solidify a planter aristocracy that would eventually seek to split with the United States in order to create its own slaveholding empire, triggering a Civil War that would decimate a large chunk of the country and kill three quarters of a million people.
I wouldn't exactly call a cotton gin "trivial" to build...
I mean, this entire discussion hinges on the definition of "trivial," so...cool.