What's in a Name?
Fight Over Civilization Property Continues
MicroProse has bought Hartland Trefoil, a small board game company that created the original Civilization way back
in 1980. The acquisition's main purpose -- to defend the Civilization name from Activision.
Earlier this year Activision licensed the name Civilization from Avalon Hill (the distributors of the board game
version), and Activision said at the time they intended to release computer games based on the name Civilization.
But Avalon Hill doesn't own the rights to Civilization, says MicroProse. Hartland Trefoil, now a MicroProse subsidiary,
does.
"Hartland Trefoil is the original creator," says Derek McLeish, MicroProse's senior vice president of marketing. "They
own all of the intellectual property and worldwide rights." McLeish says that MicroProse has filed a trademark action
to cancel Avalon Hill's registration. And so Activision's licensing of the Civilization name from Avalon Hill is invalid,
according to McLeish.
The next Civilization product from MicroProse will be called Ultimate Civilization, and it will include Civilization II, the
first Civ II expansion pack, and a new multi-player package for the game. It's due out next quarter.
But both Activision and Avalon Hill have said that MicroProse's earlier use of the Civilization name was a one-time
agreement, extending only to the first Sid Meier Civilization game, implying that Civilization II violated that agreement.
"Our understanding is that MicroProse was granted a limited license to make a game, which they licensed from
Avalon Hill," Mitch Lasky, a senior vice president at Activision, told PC Gamer in August. "That product was called
Sid Meier's Civilization - Build an Empire to Stand the Test of Time [the full title of the first Sid Meier Civ game]. It's
our current understanding that those were the only rights granted to MicroProse, and that they don't have any
additional rights."
With the license from Avalon Hill, Activision has been planning a Civilization game of its own. "Activision's production
experience and technical expertise will help ensure that Civilization will remain a benchmark for computer gaming
into the future," Activision's CEO, Bobby Kotick, said in August.
No one from Activision was available to comment on the matter today.
MicroProse's two Civ games -- Sid Meier's Civilization and Sid Meier's Civilization II -- have reaped numerous
awards (including PC Gamer's 1996 Game of the Year for Civ II), and have sold an excess of a million copies. That's
why both companies are fighting so hard to get this valuable name.
"It's a $60 million brand name," says McLeish. "We're going to assert our rights."
"I think it's an important name," says James Lin, an analyst at Wedbush Morgan who closely follows both companies.
"It's a quality franchise property," he says, "but it's probably not a back-breaker" if either company loses the rights to
it. He believes both companies are large enough and have enough franchises to weather the loss of the trademark.
"They're going to court on this," predicts Lin.
Hartland Trefoil was founded in 1971 by veteran game designer Francis Tresham, who is still with the company. The
acquisition of Hartland Trefoil makes MicroProse a board game developer as well, and Hartland's many board
games and wargames are available to be developed as computer games.
Ironically Sid Meier, who created the first Civilization computer game, is no longer with MicroProse. His new
company, Firaxis, is at work on a new Civilization-type game with a science fiction theme, called Alpha Centauri.
GT Interactive bought MicroProse earlier this year, but MicroProse's McLeish tells us that talks between MicroProse
and Hartland Trefoil were well under way long before the buy-out.
pcgamer.com
Coy |
