>>274059
> Game devs in general didn't give much of a fuck about copyright back in the 80s and into the early 90s.
Can confirm. A lot of computer games in the '80s were unlicensed ripoffs of arcade games.
The legal theory in the '80s was that trademark and copyright were separate. If you wrote your own code and drew your own art, you didn't violate the copyright. If you used a different name, you didn't violate the trademark. If you did both, there was no legal issue. So every pac-man ripoff was completely legal. It wasn't until the 1990s that trademark, copyright, and other separate laws began to be merged as "intellectual property", and not until the 2000s that lawyers started demanding to go after games with similar gameplay.