Late last year, it was revealed that Vector Tanks and Vector Tanks Extreme had been pulled from the App Store. The games were reasonably close tributes to Atari’s classic arcade game Battlezone, but did not use the original game’s IP. Ed Rotberg, creator of Battlezone, told me during an interview that he was impressed by Vector Tanks; Atari, unsurprisingly, was less so, and has of late gone on something of a rampage of destruction on the App Store, taking down as many apps that resemble its properties as possible.

After days of silence, Atari issued a statement to Joystiq:

For companies like Atari, our intellectual property portfolio is our most valued asset. While we have great respect for the indie developer community and greatly appreciate the enthusiasm that they have for our renowned properties, we need to vigorously protect our intellectual property and ensure that it is represented in highly innovative games. We have been actively engaging with numerous established and up and coming developers to help us re-imagine our iconic franchises, and outside app developers have already helped us produce two top 10 mobile game successes in Asteroids: Gunner and Breakout: Boost. We look forward to further developing strong relationships with the indie app development community through additional games that we will be releasing in the future.

Responses to Atari’s actions varied. Some argued it was unfairly throwing its weight around; others, such as Jared Newman at Technologizer, argued that Atari was perfectly within its rights, since Vector Tanks

rips off plenty of the Battlezone aesthetic, including the green wireframe tanks, the square- and triangle-shaped obstacles, and the wireframe mountains in the distance set against a black backdrop.

And while Vector Tanks Extreme adds more features,

it’s built on the same cloned foundation.

I find the case more troubling. There’s no doubt Vector Tanks was heavily inspired by Battlezone, but if that’s an argument, Atari needs to realise that the vast majority of its own IP was based heavily on other properties, too, judging by interviews I’ve done with the developers of many of its classic games. Very few games were truly original, even in the early 1980s. And even in today’s litigious society, surely Atari could have taken a smarter route. It talks about outside developers helping to produce updates of old Atari games, so why not just rebrand Vector Tanks as an iOS Battlezone series? Instead of killing the games, bring them sort-of in-house. That way, everyone’s happy.

Today, however, we see the Atari/Vector Tanks situation in reverse. Zynga has released Dream Heights, a game that appears perilously close to indie hit Tiny Towers by NimbleBit. Curiously, one NimbleBit developer said on Twitter that Zynga

did go the honest route and try to acquire us first.

The developer has since written a snarky open letter to Zynga, starkly highlighting the similarities between the games, and noting the difference in size between Zynga (2789 employees) and NimbleBit (three). What links this to the Vector Tanks spat is there’s as much Tiny Tower in Dream Heights as Battlezone in Vector Tanks, but I wonder what would happen if NimbleBit issued a similar take-down request to Apple. Would Apple comply? Possibly. But would the long-term results be the same? My guess: not at all. Zynga would simply unleash its legal team and NimbleBit would have no way to fight back.

This is the imbalance in the App Store. The same legal issues ultimately exist for the Vector Tanks developer, too. There is legal precedent that videogame mechanics are barely possible to protect—only direct IP (trademarks and so on) are; however, the small developer has no chance in fighting the big guns, regardless of whether it’s the one being inspired or the one providing the inspiration. On a gaming ecosystem that’s done more to level the playing field than any other since the days of 8-bit computers, this is a huge pity. Here’s hoping that Tiny Tower being first to market enables it to continue being a success, and that the Vector Tanks developers continue to produce great games that don’t resemble Atari’s IP enough for them to be the target of legal smackdowns.