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TacOps


Bad.Mojo

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There is a modification for an existing game (Unreal Tournament) that is going by the name TacOps/Tactical Ops. This modification is a woefully inaccurate portrayal of real tactical operations, with unrealistic weapons and combat "simulation".

You can find the modification at http://www.planetunreal.com/tacticalops/

I just wanted you guys to know as it may violate some copyright laws, or something as such. With the behaviour of the team and their fans at that site, it may very well give TacOps a bad name.

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Something with the handle of "www.planetunreal" should invite suspicion in the minds of serious persons. Anyway, ever since buying this game a year ago, I have not ceased to ba amazed by the Major's professionalism and by the collective intelligence of all the fans of the game.

[This message has been edited by rich4421972 (edited 08-04-2000).]

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Guest MajorH

Thanks for the tip.

I checked the web site and did not see any use of 'TacOps' by the game developers. They consistently use 'Tactical Ops' which does not seem to me to be reasonably actionabe. A few users choose to shorten the title in the forums but I can't see getting my drawers in a knot over that - I am not Hasbro smile.gif.

My experience is that most professional developers and publishers are very responsible about not infringing on an established trademark or tradename. The two biggest reasons for their caution are marketing confusion and the possibility of expensive legal entanglements.

Marketing confusion. In the Internet age, if you title your product too closely to the name of any existing product then you make it harder for cusomters to locate your product with Internet search engines.

Legal entanglements. If your product happens to become a financial success, previous users of your product's title will not have any dificulty in finding a lawyer who is willing to work on speculation to start a legal action to get a piece of your fine pie. Their lawyer may be working for 'free' but yours will certainly not be.

In six years I have only had one occurance of someone seriously intending to use 'TacOps' as the title of a new product. It was a gent who was developing a space wargame with a loose 'Star Trek' theme. He was using 'TacOps' as a working title during alpha testing. It came to my attention during one of my routine Internet searches. I sent him a polite email pointing out that I had been using 'TacOps' as a wargame title commercially since 1994. He immediately switched to something else.

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Best regards, Major H

majorh@mac.com

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  • 1 month later...

Hi Major,

I'm a long-time tacOps player. I think it's the first game I bought for my Mac and I got it just as it was first released. Coincidentaly, I also (up until this Friday) was the Executive Web produver for Infogrames (formerly GT Interactive), the publisher of Unreal Tournament. I participated in the marketing meeting where we discussed the TacOps/Tactical Ops dilema, and helped keep the name of the Mod "Tactical Ops", in order to keep from infringing on your TacOps brand.

If you ever need any help contacting Infogrames or Epic Games, let me know and I'll hook you up with the right folks.

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www.Tournament.com

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>Someday, it would be neat to see if

>TacOps could be ported to other OS's

>like BeOS, Solaris, Oracle or even Linux.

Sorry but I have quite enough on my coding plate already just trying to keep up with the Mac and the various flavors of Windows. Not to mention the considerable annual cost of maintaining my development tools and computer systems for Mac and Windows.

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Best regards, Major H

majorh@mac.com

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