Normally, stories where a game is removed from the internet over copywrite infringement center around Nintendo, but here’s one that involves another giant–Electronic Arts. The company issued a DMCA takedown notice to the site, GitHub, ordering them to take down a game called OpenSC2K. This was an open source remake of SimCity 2000 .
The biggest problem with this SimCity 2000 remake is that it wasn’t built entirely by community efforts. The game contained artwork and other content that had been published by Electronic Arts. The developer of OpenSC2K claims to have made an “asset conversion tool” that would allow him to replace the original artwork. “The assets are not freely available, but are currently being included,” they wrote. “I have a working asset conversion tool that can pull the original game art from the game files, but I’ve since pushed out a complete rewrite of the engine that broke a few things.”
It isn’t clear what the future holds for the game, but I can imagine it finding its way to another release. One Resetera user, called Eatin’ Olives, pointed out that often these type of remakes require users to have an installation of the original game, so that nobody is distributing copyrighted assets that they don’t own.
Source: Resetera