Hello,
For a company that made its name on "Anne-Rice-with-the-serial-numbers-scratched-off" to be suing anyone for IP theft is irony on a nigh-cosmic scale. The only game I've seen more blatant in its rip-offs is
Immortal (Connor and Duncan MacLeod, call your attorneys - and look at the "Immortality" Merit in WW's
Sorceror, while you're at it). The attitude comes straight from Rice and the Goth punk world, and the clans are a hodgepodge of historical vampire concepts and character class analogues - the Nosferatu are the original European conception of vampirism as disease and burial alive, mixed with a stealthy thief-like class, the Ventrue are the post-Stoker decadent and sensual nobles, Malkavians are modern horror-movie psycho killers with vampirism, Brujah are fighters, Gangrel rangers, and Tremere are wizards, and Toreador are bards styled to appeal to the drama-class types who wallow in the Goth sensibilities the game reeks with. Not only are the clan concepts themselves hardly WW originals, but mixing various vampire types was not exactly an innovation, either - see the early-'70's film
Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter, for one story of a man hunting vampires who were divided into several breeds with differing strengths and weaknesses. The vampire-versus-werewolf conflict was also done in other forums; the horror comics of the '70's spring first to my mind, though I also remember episodic cable-tv horror serials of the '80's using the concept as well, and the concept in broad terms can be traced back as far as Abbot and Costello, at least.
So, the style predates WW, vampiric secrecy predates WW, varied vampire subtypes predate WW, the idea of mixing them predates WW, and the vampire-versus-werewolf conflict predates WW. What are they going to sue on? Were they sneaky enough to get themselves a perpetual copyright on
Romeo and Juliet slipped into the DMCA? Unless Sony was dim enough to use actual V:TM clan names, I hope WW gets laughed out of court and counter-sued until they can't afford better than Maybellene for their black mascara. From the look of the movie so far, if anyone should be filing paper on Sony, it's Carrie-Anne Moss.
Originally Posted by Kahuna Burger:
I think they needed to be more clearly contrasted with the mythology points that both worlds ignored. That is, silver hurts werewolves, but wood doesn't hurt vampires. Vampires are superfast, but they don't change shape or become clouds of mist. Werewolves fight in hybrid form but they change whenever they want to. Vampires have a relationship with their 'sire' but they are visible in mirrors. The matter of whether some points of similarity are shared with other works isn't as relevant, (imho) as a consistant pattern of sharing both similarities and dissimilarities with "common knowlege".
The "mythology points" vary from region to region, and source to source. In many original myths, for example, wood DIDN'T particularly hurt vampires - the stakes were not used to kill them, but simply to pin them to the earth so they couldn't rise from the grave (presumably these vampires couldn't turn to mist, either...). And in
Dracula, IIRC, sunlight didn't kill some vampires, but merely pained and weakened them a bit, and perhaps kept them from using certain of their powers. There is a large array of vampiric concepts, powers, and weaknesses to choose from, and WW certainly seems to be hoping to make a quick buck off the fact that the ones they thought would appeal to their customers are similar in some ways to the ones that Sony thought would appeal to theirs.
But hey, for those bored with folklore trivia and legal details, simply rent a copy of
Big Trouble in Little China, watch it, read the section in WW's
Book of Chantries on the "House of the Jade Demon", and laugh yourself sick at the depths of this WW's hubris and hypocrisy...
