I have been very curious about this when I played the original Contra games for the NES back in the day. Did Konami get HR Giger’s permission to use his Alien designs. The creatures in those games look very similar. I am surprised there were no law suits.
What flamepanther said. Video games back then were still considered a small fry in the entertainment world, plus companies weren't so overly protective of their IPs. It was a time when the music industry featured rampant sampling, and no one cared. Heck, the Contra box art features poses copied from Arnold Schwarzenegger promotional photos for the movie Predator, just with the face changed.
I’ve seen that other pose on the Contra box attributed to Sly Stallone many times, but it actually also comes from Arnold in Predator :
I think it's because Bill and Lance are generally accepted to be based on Arnie and Sly, respectively. So people look for the closest pose by Stallone only.
True. And to be fair, I think a couple of the cutscene poses in Contra 3 are based on Stallone/Rambo photos (I don't have time to look for the proof right now, I just remember seeing it somewhere)
And you could kill Godzilla, Rambo, and the Terminator too Plus Joe Musashi bore a striking resemblance to Sonny Chiba. The funny thing is, at the time of release, Spider Man was actually officially licensed, so his appearance was legally OK. As for the rest...no. EDIT: After some research, it turns out Spider Man was NOT licensed in the game's very first software revision, but was in later revisions (of the cartridge release).
The fact that Sega thought they could get away with all those blatant cameo bosses really shows how lax things had been up until that point.
Yeah, it was all over gaming at that point. Some games didn't even bother trying to hide it. The NES game S.C.A.T.'s two PCs not only have exact portraits of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sigourney Weaver, but the characters are named "Arnold" and "Sigourney". Just a little too on-the-nose. I also just realized, having Batman and Spider Man in the same boss battle is practically comic book blasphemy, as they come from competing publishers. I don't think Marvel would have been too happy about it if they had realized it at the time.
LOL And then, relevant to Transformers fandom, Chris Huelsbeck used a SID chip cover of the "Escape" theme from Transformers: The Movie for the title screen music of Turrican II.
Holy crap, I had no idea. I’m going to have to check that out. This one I always thought was funny. The arcade/Mega Drive game Wrestle War blatantly used photos of real wrestlers: Right there on the cover are Hulk Hogan, the Road Warriors, Abdullah the Butcher, Stan Hansen, Dr Death Steve Williams, and One Man Gang. They barely even retouched anything.
My bad, it was the title theme for the first Turrican that copied TFTM. Here it is: The really great part is that Huelsbeck not only owned up to this, but he brought Vince DiCola on to make a new version for the Turrican Anthology albums. Speaking of Turrican, the graphics for that title screen are copied from here: Kings of Metal - Wikipedia Turrican itself got ripped off when several of its background tiles were copied by the original (2D platformer) Duke Nukem.
Holy crap, I totally forgot about that! The TFTM theme isn't present on the Amiga version and my memories of the C64 are very fuzzy at best. Very cool!