Just when you thought the infighting between FASA’s Battletech and Harmony Gold was history, the long-standing feud spontaneously re-ignites. Kotaku reports that the recent – totally badass – concept trailer for Smith and Tinker’s in-development Mechwarrior title has caused tempers to flare over at Harmony Gold, holders of the rights to the Robotech franchise.
In case you don’t know where this all stems from – it kinda sorta goes like this. Harmony Gold licensed a handful of anime series in the 80′s – among them the original Macross – and re-edited them into a new property they dubbed Robotech. Part of this deal were the mecha designs featured in said anime, one of which was a battle robot called the Tomahawk.
Shortly before this, FASA – the designers behind the tabletop mecha wargame Battletech – swiped some of their mecha designs from Macross, including the design of the Tomahawk destroid, which they re-named the Warhammer.
Harmony Gold eventually took FASA to court, and won an injunction barring FASA from using any of the mecha designs featured in Macross (and, by extension, Robotech).
Fast forward to 2009, when Smith and Tinker (a game development studio headed by ex-FASA founder Jordan Weisman) released a concept trailer for their upcoming Battletech reboot Mechwarrior 5. This trailer featured a mech very similar to the Tomahawk / Warhammer. Harmony Gold apparently caught wind of it, and kazaam…legal threats!
Personally I think the whole thing is inane. For starters, the destroids only play a very minor role in the original Robotech – they’re totally a blink-or-miss thing. I can see where they might worry about the Veritech fighters, which FASA also swiped and re-dubbed AeroTech fighters. But nobody really cares about the destroids (non-transformable fighting bots which only make intermittent appearances in the Robotech series).
I’ve met a handful of people at Harmony Gold and by and large they’re great – a lot of them are fans just like you and me, who happen to have landed jobs curating their favorite television series. It’s kind of disheartening seeing this come to legal threats – especially when the new Mechwarrior game looks so promising.
Honestly, this will probably amount to very little. All that’s really being asked is that the developers of Mechwarrior not step on Harmony Gold’s toes. But really – pissing in this pool just makes it suck for the fans.
Keep it civil, guys.
(Oh, and here’s the trailer in question…which looks totally badass, IP violation or not…)
Harmony Gold doesn't own the designs, what they have is the macross international merchandising rights, and the macross international rights of the animations.
The design Mechwarrior5 are using aren't the same used in Robotech, they are more as "derivated works", so they can't claim anything, the only company that can claim anything about derivated designs is BigWest who owns all the intelectual property of Macross. (mech and character designs)