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id Software Scraps Quake 2 Due to Copyright Violations
DALLAS, TX (Dr. 0) - Gaming giant id Software announced today it would not ship its eagerly-anticipated sequel Quake 2, following the controversy raised by an Epic Megagames employee concerning the ideas id allegedly stole from the Unreal team.
According to an official statement from Epic Megagames, id Software's design spec for Quake 2 contained elements that were either consciously or unconsciously pirated from the official Unreal design spec, such as female players with ponytails, male players with bald heads, and an ultimate weapon with enough power to destroy an entire planet.
"I didn't realize we'd been ripping other people off, but then I was approached by a representative from Epic," explained lead programmer John Carmack. "He showed me the Unreal codebase--which looked a lot like the QTest codebase--with a copyright dated May 21, 1997."
Paul Steed, modeller for id, added, "Epic also showed us several models of Unreal characters, some of which resembled the Quake 2 characters we'd been showing off on our website for weeks. Since Epic beat us to the punch and copyrighted them yesterday, we have to change our designs."
Despite having their intellectual property plagarized, Epic remains on friendly terms with id due to the latter's cooperation. As a show of good faith, 'Myscha the Sled Dog,' a member of the Unreal team, handed project leader Adrian Carmack a copy of the original Unreal design spec (which has since been changed completely) to give id a jumpstart on their next 3-D game.
Myscha wouldn't comment on why the document, dated over a year old, was titled "Quake Design Spec."
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