Though the striking resemblance between Fox Interactive's The Simpson's Road Rage and Sega's Crazy Taxi has long been the source of snickering among enthusiast observers, it has now become the source of a legal smashup as well. Sega of America has filed suit in a San Francisco federal court against Fox Interactive, which owns the rights to games based on the Simpsons property, Electronic Arts, which published the game, and developer Radical Games, stating that Road Rage was designed as a deliberate imitation of Crazy Taxi.
Sega holds a lengthy and complex patent on aspects of Crazy Taxi's design, which of course is built around players picking up fares and recklessly driving them around a virtual city. The suit alleges that Road Rage violates that patent, by replacing the city in question with the cartoon's Springfield setting and otherwise leaving many aspects of the basic gameplay concept unchanged.
If you'd like to dig up the patent yourself, it can be found with a little searching under patent number 6,200,138 in the
United States Patent and Trademark Office database.
Sega seeks the removal of Road Rage from retail shelves, a recall of all existing copies, and unspecified damages in return for lost profits. Road Rage has sold more than one million copies across multiple platforms worldwide. According to Reuters news service, no representatives of the defendants were willing or able to comment on the suit as yet.
