Wow, that's a pretty implausible thing to claim under oath in a deposition. I mean, it's almost impossible to NOT be somewhat influenced by some pre-existing historical or cultural sources whether fairy tales, legends, books, movies, paintings, comics, games, bedtime stories, etc. I was wondering if some context in the question or answer might be missing, then I read the full context from the deposition transcript:
> "I understand that Data East has questioned the originality of the special moves in Street Fighter II. With the exception of carrying forward some characters, moves, and control sequences from the original Street Fighter, we did not take the characters, moves, and control sequences from any other videogame or any other source such as comic books."
And realized if you change a comma to an apostrophe, Nishitani's statement becomes much less controversial. Just change "we did not take the characters, moves, and control sequences from any other videogame" to "we did not take the character's moves and control sequences from any other videogame"
A deposition is a verbal Q & A that's transcribed by a court reporter based on what they hear the person saying. The punctuation is all added by the court reporter based on their interpretation of what's implied from the context. Of course, each side's lawyers get a copy of the transcription and have an opportunity to contest any errors they choose to. However, Capcom's U.S. attorney may have missed this distinction in the transcript or, alternatively, may have been just fine with the implications of the court reporter's inferred punctuation - which Nishitani probably never saw.
Narrowing it to just the character's moves and control sequences changes it to a more reasonable claim, especially if he meant a particular joystick + button combo triggering a specific kind move. However, I've never been into fighting games so I don't know if at that time there were already pre-existing de facto standards for certain control sequences triggering specific types of moves. If not, my naive interpretation is that a dozen different control sequences triggering a dozen different moves creates over a hundred control/move pairs which could arguably be unique. Of course I have no idea if Data East's game used all or most of those same pairings - and even if it did - if those pairings are legally copyrightable but, at a minimum, turning that comma into an apostrophe does change Nishitani's testimony from something pretty unbelievable (basically sort of implying "I was raised in a cave with no exposure to pre-existing culture") to something that's entirely plausible like "our control sequence/move pairings weren't derived from another game nor were they taken from how fighting moves were sequenced in comic book frames."
Just a couple minutes ago I was another shocked villager lighting my torch, ready to join the mob on the way to set fire to Nishitani's reputation and now I'm not so sure...
Nishitani was most likely deposed in his native language where the particular English ambiguity you point out probably wouldn't happen. Listing things and marking possession use spoken helper words rather than punctuation.
Personally I think patenting game mechanics is absurd (far worse than software patents, even). It would be like an authoring patenting the three-act structure. More legal clarity around this would be nice. Maybe Judge Alsup could become a combo lab monster[0] as well to help decide the case!
bitwize•8mo ago
There's a character in King of Fighters named Benimaru Nikaido. Nobody at SNK called him that internally. Some staffers may have forgotten he had that name. The developers called him Polnareff, the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure character he was shamelessly based off of. Like, Guile may have had Polnareff's tall hair, but Benimaru had his whole vibe, including the tight-fitting effeminate tops that somehow made him even more masculine.
The title ship of Space Battleship Yamato had a powerful main cannon called the "Wave Motion Gun" or hadouhou (波動砲). When designing moves for Street Fighter, Capcom doubtless drew inspiration from the coolness of this weapon, especially its much-copied "sucking in energy before unleashing a bright blue beam of fury" animation, and just changed the final character for "gun", 砲, to one for "fist", 拳, yielding the Wave Motion Fist or hadouken.