Both Tartigrades are modeled after what a real tartigrade looks like, so unless the game owner has a copywrite on the color blue then there's no "there" there. But besides that, Ripper wasn't blue. Use of a "space faring" tartigrade might be enough to prevent the game owner's letter to CBS from being thrown into the trash immediately. Both game and show have black woman protagonist. How is this a farfetched coincidence? Both the game and show have a male gay couple. Wow, what a shocking coincidence. None of those characters look alike to me. This is some really flimsy evidence of plagiarism, but the game owner should send CBS a letter demanding some money. Even though there is precious little evidence of plagerism, there's no way they'd allow a case like this to go to trial. The question would then be, does the game owner have the money to push the claim as far as it needs to. CBS might kick out some nuisance value cash to settle it. On the TNT show, Falling Skies" there were alien characters called "Skitters". They looked like spiders with humanoid-like bodies. In season 4 of Angel, there was a brief appearance of an alien character called a "Skitter", who had spider legs and a humanoid-like body. The characters were completely fictional so not much chance of two people coming up with the same idea. Now THAT might be plagiarism. I never heard if there was any litigation.
So both a game and Trek used the same idea which is based on an actual organism that can survive in space? I'm not sure how that logic works out. Both the game and the show have humans, which look like humans. Clearly it's ripping off the game.
Also, you'll notice his dev blog received more traffic last October (when he first started making his claims around the internet) than it had in the previous five years entirely.
Certain sci-fi concepts have a time, and the time for tardigrades as astronauts is clearly here. As others have pointed out, it was pushed into the pop culture eyeline by the new Cosmos, and the general idea of tardigrades in space sort of flows pretty naturally into sci-fi stories. It even has a hint of the old Ancient Astronauts trope to it, in the idea that forms we are familiar with were space faring in eons past. And everyone has done that. Including Star Trek (The Chase, Distant Origins). It's hardly the first time the prevailing interests of popular sci-fi generally have influenced Trek, either - the Borg couldn't be more of their time if they tried. Then marry the idea to Fuller's well established interest in Paul Stamets' mushroom research and the storyline of Discovery sort of falls on your lap. You can even see the two ideas merge through development as the full-time tardigrade crewmember became prohibitive. If CBS ever had to prove this, well, there's a reason why they keep all those memos, early sketches, story ideas etc, and it's not just for the coffee table book. Even the (real) network itself was subject of a BBC documentary the Christmas Discovery was meant to debut. Its time too, had come. The rest is just confirmation bias, taking elements which would apply to dozens of properties and presenting them as suspicious as proof of plagiarism. Once you have your narrative, everything is proof of it.
I find the video OP posted to be suspect. It's from someone closely connected to GamerGate, the campaign of lunatics harassing women in the gaming industry. This seems like an attempt to stir up shit.
Just look at the similarities. If it's not obvious to you then I doubt anything I can say would change your mind.
Well, the connections are very superficial. While it is true that both Discovery and the game Tardigrades feature space travel with the help of tardigrades, a gay couple and a woman of color in the lead it doesn't really go further than that. The space travel for example is very different in the game and in Discovery. In Discovery they plug the tardigrade into the spore drive and use it as a pilot for an entire ship while in the game the tardigrade apparantly grabs and teleports you. The other two claims seem almost a bit too loughable to even consider, black and gay people are hardly a new concept, but I've got time, so here's a picture of Yolanda and Michael Burnham: Yes, they are both black, female and a lead but that's about it. Their hair styles and colors are very different, Yolanda only has one name that is apparantly Greek in origin while Michael is a Hebrew name and Burnham, I think, is English. Then there's also the gay couple, Ty and Aziz. Now, Aziz is the one with the beard which is the only trait he shares with Culber, other than being a gay man. Aziz is a technician in a long distance relationship and he's of Middle Eastern origin, as opposed to Culber who, going by his actor's heritage, has Puerto Rican ancestors. Stamets' "counterpart" is Ty, a blonde chemical engineer with tattoos on his face. Again, barely any similarities to Stamets. So, no, I don't think he has a particularly good case.
First, that doomcock video is so amazingly biased I rolled my eyes several times during that thing. Here is the part of this I have a problem with from the devs standpoint. This is an unreleased game so nobody connected with discovery could have actually played the game. Now I could see where somebody heard of the game and giant tardigrades and thought "hey that would be cool for dsc". However all the rest is where I have a problem. from his interview abdin gave he pointed to things like the "stamets" character had one long distance relationship, left them and then a new boyfriend entered the picture as one thing CBS copied. Now since nobody had played the game the only way they could have stole that would have been to go through a bunch of the dev blogs and read about the different plans and watch the trailers, etc. That seems like a lot of work to steal an idea. So while I could buy the tardigrade (even though I don't think CBS stole it), all the rest just keeps bringing up the question of why would they possibly do that? Going though dev blogs and the like since there is no completed game to play. It would be one thing if somebody had played the games and liked it and maybe subconciously brought elements over, but the fact it is unreleased and yet he is claiming they are stealing plot points is the part that has be shaking my head.
This is somewhat like calling "plagiarism" on FTL flight. It is a sci-fi trope like FTL spaceships, robots, androids, human-compatible planets, etc. If anyone was "plagiarized" it would be the real-world Paul Stammets, who gave DSC his blessing on using these creatures in their stories. You can't copyright actual, living biological creatures, even if you adapt them to your purpose. It's like using giant ants in your story.
Maybe they'll pay him a little something to settle. They probably ought to. I think Doomcock is funny as Hell. Hail Doomcock
I think it is one of those things where any one idea on its own clearly isn't plagiarism, all together do seem a little too funny to be a coincidence. But, it could be. Honestly, I have no idea if there's a case here or not.
Like I mentioned above trying to claim he stole parts of the plot and stuff like that but for an unreleased game that would require going through dev blogs, etc. which seems like a lot of work to steal a concept. The dev obviously sees the similarities more so because he knows how his whole game and plot was going to be laid out, but somebody looking at his website doesn't. It is like suing that somebody stole the plot of a movie just based on a trailer. Is it possible? I guess but I think it makes it much harder to prove.
This exactly. And I doubt anyone who is claiming it is "obvious" has actually read through his dev blog. But all this nice gathered evidence is scattered across six years' worth of posts. The head shot screenie of the black woman, for example, appears exactly once. Then she shows up once more as a full-body sprite. That's it. It's pretty much the same for the other characters. None of them, it should be noted, appear on the steam page save for very quick [sprite] glimpses in the trailer video. And if all the "proof" is one piece of pixel art each, then I'd argue Keanu has a better case against the guy for stealing his likeness for Aziz. Then last October, each of these individual bits was conveniently gathered together to show the internet CBS stole from him. And suddenly the game's digital footprint magically erupted. To put it into perspective, there are 780 MILLION games in Steam's database, most of them completely buried like this one was before October. So I ask again, what's more likely here Fuller combed every possible inch of the internet to find ideas to steal and miraculously found ideas that are hard to find even when you're looking for them or this guy just wanted attention so he could finally get the financial help to finish the game he had been working on for five years?