Little Triggers Revisited

I'd like to take a moment to revisit the story posted last week about Squaresoft shutting down a fanfic game. I've changed my position on this, and I think shutting down the project was fully justified. You see, this wasn't simply reusing art assets, characters, the battle system, and everything else from Chrono Trigger into a new game, this was a ROM hack. Essentially, in order to play this game, one would have to own a ROM of Chrono Trigger. For those of you who don't know, a ROM image is a file that allows somebody to play console games on a computer, using emulator software. Essentially, the computer simulates a Super Nintendo and the ROM goes about its business. Emulation is awesome, but very resource intensive and a gray area legally. Emulators themselves are completely legal, but ROMS are not, despite the fact that cartridges are not produced anymore. For the record, I have a portable media player with NES, SNES, and Gameboy emulators on it that I have all of my childhood favorites on. Most of them I owned physical copies of, but not all. But I digress. Anyway, so the issue here is that playing Crimson Echoes would require a person to download a ROM and apply the hack. Essentially, encouraging piracy. Had Sqauresoft allowed this, it would have set a very dangerous legal precedent for them. I've seen many people compare this to Modding, saying things like "Half-Life was popular because of Mods!" First off, Half-Life was not as popular as it was due to modding, Half-Life was popular because it was a damn fine game. In fact, Half-Life was a popular game to mod in part because it was so highly praised and widely played. If you're going to make a mod, you want the most people to be able to play it. Now, modding did give the game its ridiculously long shelf life (it was on Wal-Mart shelves up until its sequel came out) and certainly contributed to its appeal, but basing Half-Life's success on its modability is a faulty argument. Second, a ROM hack is not a mod. Period. Mods involve making changes to a legitimate copy of the game to alter the play experience. Everyone that played a Half-Life mod had to have a copy of Half-Life. A ROM hack is altering an illegal copy a game. Since Chrono Trigger has never been offered in ROM format, the ROM hack is inherently illegal. This isn't to say that legality is the end-all be all. I support the Abandonware concept, even if it isn't legal. However, a company has to constantly protect its copyrights or lose them. Not shutting down this game would have been legally disastrous for the company. Finally, there is a possibility for lost sales here. Chrono Trigger was recently released for the DS. Now, normally a fan work would not be a threat, since most fan works are nowhere near as high quality as a professional release (for proof, look at some trailers for Crimson Echoes. The writing's pretty cringe-worthy) However, to play Crimson Echoes, one would have to have a Chrono Trigger ROM, thus having less motivation to purchase Chrono Trigger DS - or so the logic goes. Now I think it's pretty much BS, but the courts don't, and failure to clamp down on this could be seen as a failure to secure the Chrono Trigger IP. In conclusion, Squaresoft is still a bunch of dicks for waiting until the last minute (and for not responding to the demand in the first place,) but the Crimson Echoes team pretty much brought this on themselves. For an example of a proper way to go about being an over-enthusiastic fan, check out Chrono Symphonic. These guys essentially wrote a script to a Chrono Trigger movie and then composed the score to it, remixing the original songs. Some of them are very high quality. It's a good example of what Jake's always talking about - fans using something they like as inspiration and modifying it to create something new.