I’m not against patents in general but looking at the list of specific insanity-induced hallucinations being patented this whole thing is ridiculous. This is on the level of being able to patent giving your restaurant guests cutlery. How is any designer supposed to keep track of which specific micro events are patented like this.
Yeah well when the copyright courts agreed to Namco’s patent on loading screen minigames it kind of freaked everyone out back then and people patented every dumbshit thing. For a short time Amazon tried to patent the single click purchase
Outside of the very specific cases of Palworld and WB’s notorious Nemesis System, you probably can just ignore the patents and do whatever you want, many of these are filed for self protection rather than to enforce them.
Metroid Zero Mission’s Mother Brain fight is patented, it literally is about shooting the player when they make line of sight with the Brain eye, besides being utterly ridiculous to have something like this patented, you don’t see anyone going to court over this.
I don’t understand how they successfully patented this without challenge. Call of Cthulhu has a sanity system, and it came out in the 80’s.
Tbf, I think Nintendo might have forgotten they even had this one, seeing as they’ve neither used the mechanic nor enforced the patent since filing it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Good call. They couldn’t have been enforcing. Amnesia had a sanity meter, and it came out in 2010.
Nintendo patents almost every mechanic they deem noteworthy, even if they amount to a bunch of gimmicky minigames or interactions. The sanity system, as it currently exists, is very rudimentary and overstays its welcome quickly, I’d argue making something substantially better was always on the table, and that alone would’ve bypassed the patent, so long is not literally the same code or instructions I guess.
So Nintendo filed the patent, and paid the maintenance fees over the years. Did they even do anything with it beyond that one game? How much money did they think they gained just by preventing others from implementing a similar mechanic?
I always wished they would have done more with the IP. Lovecraftian stuff is always fun.
The new game, “Look Outside” uses a sanity system and is also Cosmic Horror.
