Poker Smashes Me

You know I try not to make this blog personal, I really do. It just so happens that in the last week I’ve been thinking too much, and I mean WAY too much. The last post I made ended with me ranting about my first published game and how I got screwed on it. Well, today I have another story to tell you along the same lines, but this is one that goes down an entirely different road.

About a year and a half maybe two years after “Street Gang” was released, I came up with the idea for a game that combined Texas Hold’em and Tetris. Shortly afterward, my friend introduced me to a programmer at our school who was interested in getting into games. He liked the idea of the game and we began working on it together, with me on graphics and sound, him on programming.  Only a couple weeks later we had a very playable alpha. A lot of the features didn’t work perfectly (like the custom skinning), and there were still bugs that needed to be worked out, but when I had my friends and family play-test it, I couldn’t pull them away from it. My little cousin actually grabbed the table when I tried to pull his chair away from the computer after playing for about half an hour.

I’m not going to go into detail about this next part, but suffice it to say, my programmer quit and I never got the source code. Plus, nobody else was interested in programming it and at the time I did not have the time to learn Java to the extent that he had programmed the game. So I shelved it, deciding to pick it up during or after college.

Fast forward exactly four years. Voidstar Creations has announced “Poker Smash” for XBox Live Arcade, to be released soon. Now I know pretty much everyone who’s reading this is all, “You are so full of s. No way this is the same game you came up with four years ago.” Well, it is. Only problem? They did it a LOT better, and I really want to play it. It’s like someone there had read a word about it four years ago, forgot it, but then subconsciously remembered it later, solved all the problems I was having with it, and gave it HD graphics with incredible particle effects to boot. How am I supposed to feel about that? That’s like a major slap in the face.

I hate to admit it but my 2D Design professor was right: there is no such thing as creativity. I have a friend here at SCAD who came up the exact idea for “Crank” years before it was released. So seriously, take my advice. Whenever you come up with an idea, copyright it, either professionally or the “poor man’s” way (send it to yourself in a dated envelope and don’t open it). It doesn’t matter if it’s a piece of crap. Someone out there is just waiting to rip you off.