The current Mayan Countdown has us at 352 days left until the end of the world, so we here at 8bitrocket.com have decided to spend some time looking for stories that we think show that something weird is going on.

The first Sign Of Doomsday: Atari starts to defend its intellectual property

Today it was revealed that Atari has begun sending out cease and desist letters to developers who have iOS games in the App Store that even have a passing resemblance to an Atari game of old.   We here at 8bitrocket.com have long talked about the day that small  game developers would rue: the day the copyright and trademark holders for retro game intellectual property would start to mine indie games for pennies and snatches of silver.  To us, you just can’t make much money these days with your games. What we once complained about as “Mochi Pennies” are now Manna From Heaven compared to trying to get your app seen (much less purchased) on iOS.    So  copyright and trademark holders like Atari need to defend everything they have, and in this case it means going after developers of games that even resemble old Atari games.   It’s snatching pennies, but Atari is probably right in most of these cases…it’s just taken them a long time to get here.

The thing is, indie devs have been using Atari I.P, for almost 15 years now, with few repercussions.  Go look at all the “home brew” Atari 2600 games at Atariage.com that are remakes of Atari  owned I.P. for an example.   No, we know what this is about.  It’s a sign.  The end is nigh.

We’ve been waiting for this hammer to come down like this, and now we believe it is all part of The master plan.  The quickening.  Doomsday is coming, and this is the first sign.  Only 352 more days to go.  What else will happen in that time?  Tune in to find out.