While the other Code Monkeys games featuring mockbuster films used images from the films themselves for their sliding puzzle and coloring minigames, Lion and the King instead uses unauthorized frames from the 1965 anime adaptation of the manga Kimba the White Lion. Coincidentally, TV and film adaptations in this franchise have also been used in various plagiarism allegations relating to Disney's 1994 film The Lion King, the movie that Lion and the King plagiarizes.
In the original release of the game, the monster that the player could summon to attack the city was a thinly veiled parody of Godzilla, right down to using the character's iconic roar from the film series; the sound effect is even named "God" in the game's files, furthering the reference. The Godzilla parody is also depicted on the game's box art, gleefully waving at the viewer.
According to programmer Don Hopkins, who notably ported SimCity to numerous versions of Unix, Maxis ended up getting sued by Toho, the owners of the Godzilla franchise; additional details were recounted to him by Maxis CEO Jeff Braun:
"We never referred to the name Godzilla, our monster on the box cover was a T-Rex looking character, but... a few magazine reviews called the monster, Godzilla. That was all it took. Toho called it "confusion in the marketplace". We paid $50k for Godzilla to go away. In all honesty, Toho liked Maxis, they said $50k was the minimum they take for Godzilla infringement."
As a result of this suit, the monster was redesigned in the v1.2 release to resemble a giant orange salamander. The creature's roar is also changed and the game's box art is redesigned to replace the Godzilla parody with a tornado. In the v1.3 release, the salamander is given a slightly larger and more detailed sprite to fit the revised art style, but its roar (now internally renamed "Monster") is corrupted.
When Street Fighter 6's preliminary logo was revealed, it was mocked for a variety of reasons, particularly a disconnect from previous series logos and aligning with a widely criticized trend of generic, minimalist or "oversimplified" logos. Some fans noted that the logo strongly resembled an $80 design for an "SF" logo posted on the Adobe Stock Image store by user xcoolee, which had previously been used for a sci-fi convention in France. xcoolee did offer to sell exclusive rights to the logo to Capcom, but was seemingly denied. It was also discovered that a Taiwanese electronics and appliances retailer, Sunfar, had a similar hexagonal logo. On the day after Street Fighter 6's logo reveal, the front page of their website displayed an advertisement with the logo featuring a paint splatter reading the number 6 promoting gaming products, most likely as a promotional parody. It is unknown if either resemblance was a coincidence on Capcom's part, and xcoolee did not state if they knew whether Capcom bought anything from their store or not. The logo of Street Fighter 6 would be updated to appear more stylized before the game's launch in response to the negative reception, although the fan reception to the new logo was not much more positive.
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BMB is a Russian video game studio known for making bootleg Sega Genesis games that feature violent content in their game over and continue screens. Some of the most graphic instances of this plagiarized fan content depict characters such as Mario, Felix the Cat, Iron Man, and Ben 10 as either being bloodied, their head decomposed into a skull, or in more gruesome scenarios like Felix's skin being peeled off of his face. Oftentimes this is accompanied by text directly alluding towards the featured characters' deaths and the consequences of the villains' victories. The background music for these scenes is typically reused in each game, either using the title theme from UWOL: The Quest for Money and/or Corneria's theme from Star Fox. Additionally, while not a game over, BMB's bootleg hack of Angry Birds Star Wars ends with Darth Vader's mask being lifted to unveil a bloodied Bad Piggy.
The "Woohoo!" sound effect played when rescuing a Bikini Bottomite in Drawn to Life: SpongeBob SquarePants Edition appears to be a plagiarized, sped-up sound effect of Homer Simpson from The Simpsons.
The arcade game Dino Pop, manufactured by the South African company Amusement Warehouse, features an unlicensed rendition of the recurring Chocobo theme from the Final Fantasy series. Based on a demonstration video uploaded by the manufacturer, it's also believed that other renditions of the game use an unlicensed version of the Gold Saucer theme from Final Fantasy VII.
Lemmings was originally going to use a soundtrack of plagarised copyrighted music, something that was common in microcomputer games the decade prior, including pop songs and television theme songs. In the final game, these were swapped for public domain songs, though a sample of Don Messick as Scooby-Doo used for a cover of the Scooby-Doo & Scrappy-Doo theme song would be retained in the How Much is that Doggie in the Window? music track. The Mission: Impossible theme seems to have been chosen in reference to a fad on British television at the time of showing squirrels performing stunts to the song.
In 2016, Nintendo entered a legal dispute with MariCar, an Osaka-based company offering tourists Mario Kart-themed tours of the city using modified go-karts. The service included costumes based on the Mario Kart roster and alluded to the games' items in its advertising, jokingly asking customers not to attack each other with "banana peels" or "red turtle shells." Nintendo filed a complaint with the Japan Patent Office in September, arguing that the company's trademark was deliberately over-evocative of that for Mario Kart. Four months later, however, the office denied Nintendo's request, noting that "MariCar" was not a common abbreviation for Mario Kart, and thus the two trademarks did not conflict.
As the Japanese legal system does not include fair use protections for parodies, Nintendo subsequently sued MariCar the following month for copyright infringement due to the unauthorized inclusion of Mario character costumes. The case was ultimately decided in Nintendo's favor in September 2018, with MariCar being forced to drop the Mario Kart iconography and pay Nintendo ¥10 million (roughly equivalent to $89,000 USD) in damages. The company attempted to appeal the case to the Japanese Supreme Court, who rejected the motion in December 2020 and increased the fine to ¥50 million (approximately $483,000 USD). MariCar has since rebranded as Street Kart in the wake of the lawsuit.
The character Veigar seems to be based on the Black Mages from the Final Fantasy series. This connection is further backed by one of Veigar's skins, called White Mage Veigar, which has the white and red coloring of the White Mages from the Final Fantasy series.
The character Cho'Gath seems to be based off the character the Violator from the American comic book franchise "Spawn". This could be a coincidence, but when the game first launched, the Void (where Cho'Gath is from) was framed more like the world's equivalent to Hell, and the Violator is a minion of Hell.
The ending theme for Agent X II is plagarised from a popular British commercial for a product called "Shake & Vac". When asked for a reason why the jingle was used, composer Tim Follin responded: "None [referring to an answer]. Tight deadline probably."
There is a cactus prop at Universal Studios' Super Nintendo World that does not originate from an official Mario game, but rather the fanmade mod Newer Super Mario Bros. Wii. At the time of the park's opening, a Google search for "new super mario bros wii cactus" would show images of Newer's desert levels alongside New Super Mario Bros. Wii, meaning that the cacti was likely added by accident, being mistaken for official Nintendo material.
Crazy Kong's sound effects were plagarised from Crazy Climber, another game about scaling a building that featured gorillas as enemies, and predated Donkey Kong
If one is to count Crazy Kong as an official Nintendo release, it would technically be the first instance of Mario speaking, predating Donkey Kong Goes Home by two years, as he says "Hi-yah!" whenever he jumps over a barrel, using a slowed-down voice clip from the Crazy Climber gorilla.
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In 2018, the Bubsy series fandom Amino was visited by a user named "Beelzebubsy" alleging to have unreleased concept art drawn by Ken Macklin for Bubsy's design in Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind. Bubsy fans immediately noticed that one design - a female Bubsy that was scrapped for being "too sexualized" - bore a close resemblance to "Modern Bubsy", a fan-made interpretation of the character as a depressed transgender prostitute created by SqrlyJack, an artist who hates Bubsy and gained notoriety for being malicious towards Bubsy fans. This connection was further drawn by the presence of another alleged prototypical design inspired by Michael Jackson, who SqrlyJack is known to be a fan of, and his jacket used in the music video to Jackson's song "Beat It", as well as a later post by the same user showing a screenshot of a Bubsy parody from one of her RPG Maker games. The third concept art does have a strong resemblance to a real piece of Bubsy concept art shown in a 1990s magazine, suggesting it may have been traced.
If one observes the hoax concept art closely, they can see that the attempt at replicating Macklin's signature does not completely match up with his real signature, such as having a lowercase a with a double-edged side instead of one, and a lowercase k without a sloped bottom, adding to the already strong suspicion that the concept art was faked.
Another Bubsy fandom member, Xindictive, who was on a Bubsy Discord server with late Bubsy creator Michael Berlyn, has said on occasion that both Berlyn and a former friend of SqrlyJack have confirmed the images to be faked for a fact. However, since the Discord server where these communications presumably took place has been closed as a result of hacking, it is hard to access these direct confirmations.
Xindictive's claim in the comment section of a Slope's Game Room video on Bubsy that presents the fake concept art as real: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jea5BBMIA0A&lc=UgwIn_sCDJ1pf0goZ214AaABAg
The first two versions of Pengo use "Popcorn" by Gershon Kingsley as the background music, in the third and fourth, they were swapped for an original tune.
Flappy Bird was removed from app stores by creator Dong Nguyen on February 8th 2014, due to being overwhelmed by its success and feeling guilt over the addictive, frustrating nature of the game, which he had originally intended to be relaxing. Although many speculated that the game was taken down by Nintendo due to the game's pipes and their similarity to the pipes from the Mario series, both Nguyen and Nintendo denied this.
Nguyen claimed that his worries about the game had lost him sleep, and removing the game from sale managed to restore piece of mind - despite this, Nguyen did promise a Flappy Bird comeback, albeit in a less addictive form, which would eventually come in the form of an official sequel: Flappy Birds Family for Amazon Fire TV.
Some eBay users attempted to sell the iPhones with the original game installed for up to $99,900, but the listings were removed due to eBay's rules against selling technology that has not been factory reset.
Quik & Silva features many plagiarized characters as duplicated enemies, including characters from Nebulus, Bubble Bobble, Contra, and The Great Giana Sisters. Among these characters is Sonic the Hedgehog, whose first title had not released at that point, technically making it Sonic's first appearance in a home console video game, even if unauthorized and predated by the arcade game Rad Mobile.
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In September 2021, Neopets attempted to enter the budding Non-fungible Token market with a project called the "Neopets Metaverse", predictably sparking major backlash from the Neopets fandom citing pre-existing criticisms and negative stigmas surrounding NFTs. However, much less predictable were the string of controversies that followed, which involved using the fansite Dress to Impress to make their NFTs (notably signified by one of the tokens having a glitch only present on Dress to Impress and not the official Neopets site), promotion of an R-rated NFT collection titled "Horny Hedgehogs", banning the word "gay" from their Discord server but permitting homophobic slurs, portraying those opposed to NFTs as the "Soyjak" meme, and in secret planning to get the main game developers to implement long-requested features so fans would "shut up" about the NFT project.
When the project first spread, the Neopets Twitter account stated in a direct message that it was a scam, putting doubt on its legitimacy, but the main brand would later would endorse the project. The most infamous endorsement came when the winner of an art contest ended up being an anti-NFT protest image, which they removed and - after being called out - subtly censored it by compressing it so hard that it couldn't be read without extremely close observance.
After two years, Neopets ultimately announced in July 2023 that it would be completely shuttering the Neopets Metaverse project after former CEO of the Metaverse division Dominic Law brokered a "management buyout deal", and that the game would no longer have any cryptocurrency or NFT elements.