Love’m or hate’m, video game patents have played an important role in the evolution of the video game industry.
Ross Dannenberg and Steve Chang of Banner & Witcoff, Ltd have put together this terrific feature article: “The Ten Most Important Video Game Patents” for Gamasutra. In assessing the patents’ importance, they used four criteria:
- Relativity to Video Games
- Financial Value
- Technological Importance
- The IT-Factor
The winning patents honored/discussed in the piece are:
- Nintendo’s NES – Game Cartridge Lock Patent (U.S. Pat. No. 4,799,635)
- Alpex’s Patent Covering RAM-based Screen Mapping (U.S. Pat. No. 4,026,555)
- Immersion’s Force Feed-back Patents (U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,275,213 and 6,424,333)
- Freedom Wave’s Wireless Controller Patents (U.S. Patent Nos. 6,280,327 and 6,878,006)
- Sega’s ‘Crazy Taxi’ Direction Indicator Patent (U.S. Patent No. 6,200,138)
- Koei’s Grouped Character Battle Method Patent (U.S. Patent No. 6,729,954)
- Interlink’s Motion Sensing (a.k.a. WiiMote) Patent (U.S. Patent No. 6,850,221)
- The Pong Patent (U.S. Patent No. RE28,507)
Check it out, its a good read.
Also, FYI, I have discovered Ross’ Patent Arcade blog where, among other things, he tracks Video Game Lawsuits. For your future reference I have added it to my “Video Game Law Blogs” roll down the right side of my blog (after “Topics”).
Source: Gamasutra