psi-ops posts

Several days ago Midway announced that it had gotten a bid of $33 million from Warner Bros. to sell off parts of their publishing company, including two development studios and the rights to the Mortal Kombat game license. Today Midway announced the schedule for the bidding process for all of their dev studios and IP rights.

Basically Midway will be taking bids until June 24 to acquire some or all of its remaining assets. That includes four development studios (Chicago, San Diego, Seattle and one in the UK) and the rights to Midway's considerable game library and the license to make games based on the TNA wrestling franchise. An auction will be held on June 29 to determine the final winner or winners and a court hearing to approve the sales will be made on July 1. If we had the money we would totally want to get the Psi-Ops franchise but that's just us.

Things haven't been going Midway's way lately but today, according to Kotaku, the game publisher got some good news. A federal judge has ruled in Midway's favor in a copyright case involving their 2004 action title Psi-Ops:The Mindgate Conspiracy. A screenwriter named William L. Crawford filed a lawsuit against Midway in 2007, claiming Midway had stolen elements of an screenplay of his, also named Psi-Ops.

Crawford said in his lawsuit that Midway may have gotten access to elements of his screenplay via web sites that were created to support his project. He also claims to have shopped the script around to companies at the 2001 E3 trade show. However a judge was unmoved, ruling that there was "minimal evidence supporting a reasonable possibility" that Midway had gained access to the screenplay.