Microsoft’s multiplayer law suit win

The plaintiffs in question are two chaps called Peter Hochstein and Jeffrey Tenenbaum, who created a multiplayer gaming patent in 1994 and sued Microsoft and Sony six years ago in 2004. Sony capitulated, settling out of court for an undisclosed sum but thankfully, Microsoft fought the case and have now won, with the case being dismissed and enabling Microsoft to claim the undoubtedly hefty legal fees from Hochstein and Tenenbaum.

The multiplayer patent itself reads like this:

“A local video game including a communicating controller. The controller receives local command signals created by a set of player controls. The controller also receives remote command signals received through a modem which were created by a remote video game through a similar set of player controls. The controller includes a synchronizer which produces synchronizing codes to be sent to the remote video game to synchronize the games. The synchronizer synchronizes the local and remote command signals such that both are received by a game microprocessor simultaneously. Memory stores the player parameters and are retrieved whenever the synchronization codes of the local and remote video games have not matched for a predetermined number of iterations.”

If you have the patience to pore over the wording of that patent, you’ll see that it covers any game that has an online multiplayer mode, so if Microsoft had lost the case then online gaming, including Modern Warfare 2 and any massively multiplayer game, could potentially be liable to the same suit. What galls us more is the date of this patent: 1994 saw the exponential rise of Doom, a major contributor to the popularity of multiplayer gaming across local and wide area networks. A coincidence that Hochstein and Tenenbaum conceived the patent then?