Q*bert clone CuBert merrily infringes copyright

Okay, to be quite honest, IP quibbles aren’t really something we’re particularly for or against. We'd rather go out for a nice meal and an intimate evening with a flesh eating virus than spend time entertaining lawyers, but we can understand perfectly why a game developer would want to protect his intellectual property.

Of course, we can also understand gamers wanting a variety of, for example, Breakout clones to choose from on their favourite gaming platform. Atari thought otherwise, if you remember.

Anyway, a new ‘homage’ to the classic coin-op Q*Bert has now appeared on the App Store that seems to stretch the concept of game cloning to its elastic limit.

CuBert doesn’t really make any attempt to adapt the block-bouncing gameplay of the original, so much as duplicate it. This would be fine if it was an authorised conversion, but from what we can tell it’s simply a direct, unofficial copy.

Again, if it was being given away for free, the altruistic gesture would relieve some of the tension that seems to be surrounding this iPhone adaptation, but that’s not the case - CuBert currently weighs in at £1.19.

We’ve been seeing similar occurrences with Nintendo properties when Duck Hunt was recently removed from the App Store due to its clear likenesses to the original NES game, although a host of Game & Watch clones have so far gone unchallenged.

Gottlieb might not be making video games anymore, but it’s still very much in business and has continued licensing Q*Bert out to most every games platform in recent memory, including the PS3 and Windows.

Whether or not it’ll put a stop to LagMac Studio making money from its most famous character remains to be seen, but if you absolutely must have this unofficial duplicate, you probably shouldn’t dawdle.