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Official statement about "Turrican 3 C64" (inofficial working title)

by Ted/Classical Games, author of the project


In 1997, a project was started: An inofficial sequel to the famous
"Turrican I & II" on the Commodore 64. Grahpics by Big User, 
musics by The Blue Ninja and coding by Ted/Classical Games (me).

When The Blue Ninja put some screenshots of this project onto his
homepage and mentioned the inofficial working title "Turrican 3" there,
he soon received a mail from Julian Eggebrecht, producer of Factor 5.
In it our team was warned of using the name "Turrican", which is
copyrighted to Softgold, and was urged to change the design of the 
player sprite, as it looked too similar to theirs used in Turrican II
on the Amiga.

To avoid endangering the whole project, The Blue Ninja immediately
removed the screenshots and the mentioning of the working title.
A letter to Manfred Trenz was written to ask about using the brand
"Turrican" for this project. Before any answer could arrive, something
happened:

A friend of us, known as MacGyver/DMAgic, took a version of the
first level to the "Willow Party 1998" to show it to the party
attenders. People were amazed and some asked whether it is allowed
to copy this alpha version of level 1. Any copying was of course
denied, because the first level was incomplete and an official
preview was planned when the level was 100% finished, the
copyright question was solved and an official title was found.

Everybody seemed to accept that. But Sunday evening after the
party, suddenly a "Turrican 3 Preview" by "Laxity" showed up on the
net. In the Laxity-intro, "Animalo" and "Goat" of Laxity got credited
for "supplying" this "preview". Animalo and Goat were also present
at the partyplace and seem to have lurked until they could access
MacGyver's disks to steal the one with the game and copy it without
MacGyver's permission.

When Floyd/Tempest (organizer of the party) spotted the two
having copied it, they lied that they managed to convince MacGyver
of allowing them to copy it.

Next to the usual crime of intentionally releasing a program
without the author's permission, not respecting the will of
the creator, fooling someone who tries to do something really
great on and for the C64, this acting also endangers us because
the unsolved copyright problem, Factor 5 can take legal action
against us because of the name "Turrican 3" and the player sprite
problem mentioned above. Obviously the offenders don't care about
anything of this.

Under this circumstances we are not ready to continue 
development, the project with the unofficial workname
"Turrican 3" is cancelled until further notice.

As long as such people are not kicked out of the C64-scene,
"Turrican 3" or other games for the C64 by us will not be realized.

Signed,

Ted/Classical Games