Original Madden Designer to Take EA to Court

[Shawn Zipay]

A federal judge in California has denied EA their request to dismiss a lawsuit from Robin Antonick, the original designer of the Madden NFL football series.

Antonick has accused EA of not paying him royalties on any titles following the original John Madden Football. This includes every single iteration of the Madden series since that first one. The lawsuit says that EA also failed to keep his work on Madden confidential, which was required based on Antonick's publishing and development contracts.

"We have very compelling evidence indicating that EA used Mr. Antonick's ground-breaking code and design elements as the basis for both past and present Madden NFL titles," said Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro LLP partner and Antonick attorney Robert Carey. "Yet, EA has failed to compensate him as required by his agreement or give him proper credit for his work. We look forward to proving our case at trial, and we are very confident that we will prevail."

As per the lawsuit, Antonick is seeking damages from Electronic Arts that are related to "unpaid royalties, punitive damages, and disgorgement of all profits." The trial is slated to begin on June 17, 2013.

(via GI.biz)

[CptainCrunch]

Kind of ironic how publishing companies fear pirating soooooo much yet take the idea from the developer and not pay them.

[azalea]

He's alleging EA is using code developed from his to this day. I seriously wonder how; those were the 8-bit days and programming is slightly different now.

[Porkfist]

Kind of ironic how publishing companies fear pirating soooooo much yet take the idea from the developer and not pay them.

I love this point. Kudos to you sir.

Also this could just be some simple algorithm that has just been copied and pasted over the years because it just works. Perhaps something like how each player identifies his position (coordinates) on the field?