Crap! What do I do; what do I dooooo?!

[ManekiNeko]

Anyone here remember Pac-Mon or Super Pac-Mon? You might... one of these Pac-Man clones was reviewed in an old issue of the Digital Press newsletter. I designed both games in 1996, shortly before emulation made shareware clones of popular arcade games obsolete, yet I still occasionally get letters about them. Letters like this one from a cell phone company...

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Greetings
I am a project manager currently working with a Redwood City, CA based wireless company. I am managing a Flash demo project for a new product. As part of this demo we would like to show a brief animation of a game being played on a mobile phone handset. To do this our designer will have to create screens of the game for the animation process. We would like to use Pacman as the game for this example and I would very much like to use screen shots from your game "Pacmon" as inspiration for this project. I am worried however of violating trademark/copyright regulations.

I have seen many Pacman "clones" on a variety of web sites and have collected screen shots from these games as well as from your own version of the game. I would like to give these screen shot samples to our designer so that he can use them for the basis of our game. He would only use these screen shots as examples of the game layout/look-and-feel and would not copy them outright. We would also like to create some wallpaper designs for this animation sequence. These wallpaper designs would be based on characters from the Pacman game such as "Ms. Pacman", "Baby Pacman" etc.

As far as I understand, PAC-MAN (as written) is a trademark of Namco. I would like to know if we will need permission from Namco to use the name "Pacman", "Ms. Pacman" etc.. (as written) as well as use images for the animation and wallpaper that resemble the game. As far as I can tell "Pacman" as written is not a currently registered trademark.

Would you advise me as to what permissions I will need to obtain or if it is possible to buy a license to your game. I apologize for sending such a long e-mail, it seems to be the best way to explain all of this. Please feel free to call me if you have any questions, my contact information is listed below.

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So, do you guys think this is for real? And if so, how should I handle this situation? To be honest, I'm really not interested in the money... I just want to be credited for my work.

JR

[punkoffgirl]

Wow, Jess, that sounds pretty REAL to me! I'd say give him a call, what would it hurt? Maybe he can comp you a copy of the workup, so you can have it as a momento! Keep us posted on what happens! And another DP superstar is born! <-- riveted in my seat!

[Captain Wrong]

Cool deal man! I'd say write him back and get your name in lights, urr...the glow of a cellular phone display anyway!

PS- You were soooooo right about that Action 52! They even screwed up Minesweeper. How do you do that?!?