Games which are "substantially similar" to other games infringe copyright. It doesn't matter if the assets and code are all original, etc. This is settled copyright law.
Already familiar with it; doesn't make it right, or justifiable. And there's plenty of case law in both directions on reverse engineering and cloning; the exact boundary would depend heavily on the details of a specific case.
In any case, it'd also be much harder to prove any harm caused by a variant like this, which is designed specifically to be un-fun, as difficult as possible, look nothing like the original, and not have any commercial interest at all. Which makes the presumption of illegality entirely inappropriate.
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Atari v. Phillips. Look it up.
Games which are "substantially similar" to other games infringe copyright. It doesn't matter if the assets and code are all original, etc. This is settled copyright law.
Already familiar with it; doesn't make it right, or justifiable. And there's plenty of case law in both directions on reverse engineering and cloning; the exact boundary would depend heavily on the details of a specific case.
In any case, it'd also be much harder to prove any harm caused by a variant like this, which is designed specifically to be un-fun, as difficult as possible, look nothing like the original, and not have any commercial interest at all. Which makes the presumption of illegality entirely inappropriate.