The flyer produced by Sidam for Magic WormĪtari, in an effort to protect its assets (and at the same time fire a warning shot across the bows of any other unscrupulous businesses thinking about distributing pirated versions of its games) took Video Amusements of Canada to court with the intention of shutting down the distribution of Magic Worm. Created by Sidam (a notorious bootlegger of Atari games based in Italy) and distributed by Video Amusements of Canada Ltd, the game was very clearly a copy of Atari’s Centipede. The pirated game concerned was called Magic Worm. The contention was that they were selling a game that bore striking similarities to one of its most successful releases. I came across an interesting document in which one of Atari’s most experienced coders Ed Logg, analyses pirated code for the purpose of a lawsuit to be brought against an arcade distributor. This week, I thought we’d take a look at a legal case brought to the Canadian courts by Atari in 1981. During the peak of Atari’s success, one of the more unlikely tasks given to some of its coin-operated programmers, was to analyse potentially pirated versions of their games.

Centipede arcade game