Some time ago, I created a nifty OGRE vehicle model in Spore. For those of you unfamiliar with what an OGRE is, it’s a big tank featured in a wargame created about, oh 30 years ago by a guy named Steve Jackson. Pretty iconic for sci-fi grognards, totally WTF for everyone else.
Anyway, I loaded up Spore for about the first time in three months, and low and behold, my OGRE was gone from my catalog.
Now, I might be assuming the worst here, but are SJ Games and/or EA games really that petty to be tracking down IP from a 30+ year old game that nobody plays any more? For the case of SJ, who is an acknowledged asshole and flake, maybe, but EA? LOL.
Guess I’ll have to make the OGRE again and call it the MINITAUR or something.
Nevermind my rambling, just thought this irritating and amusing at the same time.
Dude, did you get any pics of your OGRE before it was lost? I’d love to see it – that’s still one of my favorite boardgames from when I was a kid. I read somewhere that SJG was working on a new edition so possibly that’s why they were so defensive about this, but I have to marvel at the idea of someone combing through all the Spore mods to catch this.
It’s not necessarily a copyright thing. At Xmas my sister was showing me some of her Spore creations and about half of them had inexplicably vanished from the servers. Completely inoffensive creations that violated no copyrights whatsoever.
Hmm. I wonder if all my Star Control 2 homages have vanished, or my Prinny. I hope not, it took frigging forever to make a decent looking UrQuan with included fighter.
I got him back from the picture in photobucket (above) which I somehow remembered to save as a .png. I dumped the .png back in the vehicle creator, renamed him, and we’re good to go.
At least the dirty bastards didn’t nuke my cheshire cat.
Nice Mark III, scharmers. Why SJG doesn’t have some indie programmer code an OGRE/GEV/Shockwave computer game I don’t understand. Lots of people would buy it.
This seems like a pretty ridiculous thread title to post on a forum when there’s no actual proof that those mentions are even involved with the problem. Maybe “fuck Spore’s sometimes buggy server infrastructure” or something.
And seeing as how you still have the .png then uhh… you know… who really cares?
Was the OGRE computer game any good? I remember staring at it in a catalogue I got with Car Wars, fascinated. We played Car Wars tabletop, but never really played it per se. More like, we made characters and designs endlessly and couldn’t be bothered to do the actual combat on the roads with the right tools/mechanics. Didn;t help that it was just usually me and a friend.
I created the first OGRE in Paranoia once (as I’m sure many others did)!
Hee, me and my buddies also just designed Car Wars cars.
I played the OGRE game on an Atari 800 emulator several years ago. It was a faithful recreation of the board game, and I don’t remember the primitive AI being a problem, since it was just an OGRE attacking and then leaving.
Warpstorm, I guess EA might own the rights…but wasn’t the old game from about 24 years ago? Is it possible they got rights in perpetuity?
