I last month covered Atari’s spat with the people behind Vector Tanks. In short, an indie makes a Battlezone tribute, which, to be fair, was pretty damn close to Battlezone, and tries to licence the original property but Atari remains silent. The dev then devises a sequel, which is to Battlezone what Galaga is to Space Invaders: a superficially similar game but one that actually feels very different. Atari finally notices Vector Tanks and has both games removed from the App Store, citing IP infringement. At the same time, it rampages about the place, forcing devs to change the names of games with ‘pong’ in the title. The company had previously, during its first (and brief) foray into iOS, also attempted to get bat-and-ball games (i.e. Breakout derivatives) removed from the store, albeit with less success.

Sites all over the web are now saying that Atari’s being the good guy regarding indies, through its Pong Indie Developer Challenge¹. It’s a great opportunity for indies to rework a classic game, and get up to $100,000 for their efforts, they say! Well, right until you bother to read the terms and conditions, which were expertly covered by Brian Robbins on Gamasutra yesterday.

It’s spec work, pure and simple. This isn’t so much an opportunity for indie devs as exploitation—a way for Atari to potentially get dozens of game ideas and not have to pay for them (since all submissions become Atari’s property, regardless of whether the submitter wins the competition). Despite its aggressive stance on the App Store, Atari has supported indies in the past—the recent remakes of Breakout and Asteroids were both farmed out to small developers rather than being done in-house. Had that been the same here, great. It would have been a way for Atari to again say: “Look! We do care about indies.” However, spec work is something I cannot celebrate, and so I find it difficult to see the Pong Indie Developer Challenge as anything more than a cynical attempt by a major publisher to get videogame ideas on the cheap.

¹ And the choice of game also presumably explains Atari’s blitz of App Store games with ‘pong’ in their names. Although since Pong is an Atari trademark, that’s not something I consider bad form from Atari.