I love the idea, but have you guys seriously considered the intelectual property rammifications of this? It seems that you're all under the impression that if it's provided without compensation, that it will go unchallenged. Well, I'm sure this is true of the artists and coders who made the game. No way is this true of the people selling the game.

The fact of the matter is that Chrono Trigger is a way to earn money. If you release this to the general public, even if you don't get any money from it, it is a potential loss of revenue. Why do you think they go after rom distributers? How much did rom distribution hurt the sales of FFO, FFAnthologies and FFChronicles? This is in that same ballpark.

I'm pretty sure that shortly after you release a playable demo, you will receive a tactfully worded "cease and desist" notice from the lawyers at Squeenix. It is conceivable that there is enough apathy in the square office to get away with this, or that it will go long enough for a strong underground presense to exist before they get involved that it won't die, but I doubt it.

Of course you've probably already considered this and decided it's worth the risk of being told to remove it, so I'm probably just killing my own personal time by posting this. Oh Well.

Here's to hoping for apathy or ignorance on the part of Squeenix.

Well for 1.
Outdated systems can legally have roms.
and freely distribute them.
Meaning that everything from Atari 800 to Sega Dreamcast is completly legal.
But Gameboy, GBA, PS1, PS2, GameCube, X-Box, and N-Gage(Yuk) are illegal.

2. This is not in any way making profit.
We are just a bunch of fans, remaking one of our beloved games.
Also it is considered a sort of parody, since we arnt actually cracking into there coding or anything.

Besides, Square-Enix knows that they will lose alot of fans if they shut us down ;)
There are alot of people waiting for this MOD.

History channel would have to have an episode of them (SE) in "great blunders in history" if they shut this down. lol

Sifian's point isn't that CT is a SNES rom, it is that Square-Enix [SE] can use CT (and any other properties) in future projects. Providing a quality reproduction of CT for PC would potentially take away from revenues that SE could make from FFChronicles (if I remember correctly). This goes for any game; it seemed plausible that the Mega Mans for NES were free domain after 11+ years since MegaMan6, but Capcom released MM1-6 for GBA... thus those NES roms take away from that anthology's GBA sales (since you can play NES roms on GBA, PocketPC, laptop, etc.). In regards to CT:RP, I don't think SE will care because FFChronicles has been out for a while and most potential consumers have already bought the product and obviously the SNES version is not in production (but is still very valuable... I can't believe I don't have a copy :( It seems like I did in the past, but it was actually my friend's...).

Anyway, I'll join Sifian to toast to CT:RP and, hopefully, to SE's apathy about the project :)

Actually, I believe that the team has looked into this and our mod is considered a "parody" of the original, which is actually perfectly legal. If they do ask us to "cease and desist", then we can still play the game ourselves happily and marvel at our wondrous creation. Plus, if we want to get hired somewhere someday, we can just hand them a copy and say, "Look what I made!"

Hopefully our project will be considered as a "parody" of the original and fanwork. Besides, i've never heard of any Unreal Tournament mod "stealing" potential fans from a fully developed game by the original creators. If we did that i would be very happy ( it would be a first in games history and would mean that we are very good at doing this).

I think the "business blunder" argument makes more sense than the parody argument. A parody is by definition a mocking of the original, see much of the work of Weird Al Yankovic as example. In musical terms, this is more like a cover, which one needs to pay royalties to the original on. Of course any royalties of nothing paid still comes out to nothing.

You definitely could get away with this if the text were either really dorky or satirical. Let's say scattered through the world are various Nu's who go off on occasional diatribes about continuity of the universe and paradoxes, that would probably fall into the category of parody.

>>
"Besides, i've never heard of any Unreal Tournament mod "stealing" potential fans from a fully developed game by the original creators."

You can bet that a few people would be really unhappy if someone made a UT mod that replicated the story mode of Half-Life. Not that someone would bother to do that, but that's exactly what this is.

Actually... I don't want to put this MOD into any bad light, but I do know of a MOD that got canned for its material.

It was a Quake2 mod called Generations. It was awesome. It was a deathmatch mod where you could fight against other people as BJ Blaskowitz from Wolfenstein, the Doom marine, the Quake 1 guy, and the Quake 2 guys (and gals). And each character used the weapons from his respective game. And they duked it out in levels from their game. So you could have the Wolfenstein guy chasing the Quake 1 guy around with a chaingun in the first level of Doom.

Yeah, they got canned by Id. But it was because they ported over sounds and textures from the original games. However, they were doing the mod as an "id software tribute".

But I'm sure we're safe.

-John

Mixing Half-life with Unreal is a bad idea, both are competing FPS from different companies.
CT it's an old game, not released in the PC format, a RPG, and our remake is based on an Engine originaly built for FPS, a different genre. This done by fans in a different format from the original and almost 10 years after.
We're not competing in any way with Square or trying to steal their community if they want to release in the future a remake of CT in PS2, i beleive they do not have any trouble with us, it's not like anyone won't buy a CT official Remake just because there is a MOD done by fans...
This is just a tribute, like a fan doing an artwork or a fanfic, so I beleive we're not a threat to them.

I 100% agree with you.

As long as we don't rip anything directly from the original game, then we have the copyrights to all the content in this MOD.
Any work becomes your own from the moment it is created - this includes things like fanart - which our game could be considered as.
HOWEVER - The original characters, music, game name, etc may be copyrighted by Squaresoft.
(Look at CT:R for example - Squaresoft seems to be 100% ok with that - aside from the fact that the creators have signed a contract stating that they will not release the demo for consoles.)

For more information regarding copyrighting laws:
US Copyright Office
(There are several countries that abide by these copyrighting laws aside from the US, and Japan is one of them.)

I don't think that Squaresoft would shut our project down. Ay least I'd hope not. It may be wise to contact them and find out for certain. If it's not already ok, we may be able to work out some sort of arrangement.

Emulators are legal, but frowned upon by corporations such as Nintendo.
Whereas ROMS are not legal.
It's said that it's legal to own ROMS if you already own the game (not as a ROM), and if you don't, you're supposed to delete the ROM after 24 hours. I don't know for sure if this is legal or not - but I do know that corporations severely dislike any sort of ROM ownership. (Even if it is only for 24 hours.)

-Alezunde

According to a few sources; it is ok to do something like this... so long as you don't take anything directly from te original. You guys are remaking EVERYTHING yourselves; hence there is not really a problem. If you were to take alot of their own creations, add some of your stuff, and then try to sell it; then you would be in trouble.

In other words; I am quite certain that this project can legally have no actual problems...

Alezunde, I read that a lot too, but I am pretty sure it's not true. For one, they would never allow it, because it is nearly impossible to regulate it, and they don't HAVE to let you have a free trial of anything.

Square still owns the intelectual property of everything even if we remake all the stuff. So they can dictate whatever they want and we will abide to it.

Besides, if SE tells us to stop this will still look awesome on our resumes if we apply for a job in the games biz someday.

... if we actually make anything of substance.
Because there are MODs all over the place.
Now we just have to prove ours is better than the rest. ;)

-Alezunde