WebProNews

Beijing Olympics site borrowed, removed Snow Day

Online Flash games appearing on the Beijing 2008 site may have been appropriated from at least one other designer after one game maker found his had been pirated.

Before its removal from the official Beijing 2008 Olympics website, the Fuwa Fight the Winter Clouds game allowed players to shoot ice cubes at clouds to make it snow.

Just like Snow Day, a game created in 2006 by Cadin Batrack, who noticed the uncanny resemblance a couple of weeks ago and expressed displeasure at this theft.

"The Olympics stole my game," said Batrack on his blog. "They downloaded the swf file from my site, decompiled it, swapped out the little guy for the Fuwa characters, took my name off of it and republished it as their own."

Batrack also noted two other games on the Beijing site closely resemble ones appearing at Orisinal, home of numerous excellent Flash games created by developer Ferry Halim.

"I can’t really tell if these are clones or reskinned versions of Ferry’s files, but those stars in Leap and Leap look pretty damn similar to me," said Batrack.

Batrack also noticed Chinese portal Sohu designed the Beijing 2008 site. That's the same Sohu that accused Google of stealing a software tool for Google's Chinese portal.

The Sydney Morning Herald cited Sohu's current involvement in a lawsuit brought against them by several music label.