Atari, one of the pioneers of video games, filed a lawsuit against the Swiss food company Nestle due to the latter releasing an advertisement for its flagship confectionery product, the Kit Kat.
The classic video game company accused Nestle of violating copyright laws. The Swiss food company showed a group of people playing a video game which closely resembles the Atari-developed "Breakout" which was released in the '70s. In the advertisement, Kit Kat bars replaced the bricks featured in the original game.
The marketing strategy employed in the ad focused on encouraging and inspiring audiences to go out, buy the famous chocolate snacks and consume them. Even though the ad was only released in the United Kingdom, it didn't stop Atari from filing the suit.
Atari deemed that the price for compensation is three times the profits that Nestle earns from releasing the ad.
The ad was also accused of misappropriating the video game's name, which was shown to be "Kit Kat: Breakout." The video game depicted in the ad looked too similar to the Atari game, and the company feels exploited that they were not compensated by Nestle for depicting it in their ad.
The ad was released last year, and the lawsuit was filed in San Francisco on Aug. 17.
The objective of "Breakout" was fairly simple: players were to control two parallel paddles that have sufficient spacing between them to hit up to three balls on colored bricks. The first ball is live at the start of the game, while the other two balls are enclosed within the colored bricks. As the player removes more of these bricks, the higher the chance of the balls to be set loose.
Once all the balls are at play, the game becomes more difficult, and if one ball goes out of bounds, then that ball is lost. The game continues until either all the bricks are eliminated, or the player runs out of balls to make use of.
