The fight between ZeniMax and Oculus is about to get bloody. Back in 2014, the company behind games like Fallout and Elder Scrolls announced a lawsuit against Oculus claiming that they had misappropriated Virtual Reality related ZeniMax trade secrets as well as infringed ZeniMax trademarks and copyrights. Interestingly, this happened shortly after Oculus was purchased by Facebook for $2 billion.
In August 2016, the existing complaint was integrated with a straight accusation towards former employee and legendary programmer John Carmack. The creator of DOOM and Quake, now Chief Technical Officer (CTO) at Oculus, allegedly copied in an illegal way thousands of documents containing proprietary IP to a USB device that he would then take with him to Oculus.
As you might remember, Carmack was instrumental in helping Oculus Founder Palmer Luckey at the very beginning. Luckey admitted as much over and over again; of course, we're not in the position to judge whether there were any wrongdoings there.
The court case due to begin shortly will settle everything and yesterday ZeniMax took the opportunity to release another statement on the matter.
With the start of the trial of our case in Federal District Court in Dallas against Defendants Facebook, Oculus and its management, ZeniMax and id Software welcome the opportunity to present substantial evidence of the Defendants’ misappropriation of our Virtual Reality (VR) intellectual property. That evidence includes the theft of trade secrets and highly confidential information, including computer code. ZeniMax will also present evidence of the Defendants’ intentional destruction of evidence to cover up their wrongdoing. ZeniMax and id Software are the visionary developers of breakthrough VR technology, and look forward to the vindication of our claims.
Oculus, as you might expect, isn't exactly eager to give in to these claims. Last week, they released the following statement to UploadVR via email.
We’re eager to present our case in court. Oculus and its founders have invested a wealth of time and money in VR because we believe it can fundamentally transform the way people interact and communicate. We’re disappointed that another company is using wasteful litigation to attempt to take credit for technology that it did not have the vision, expertise, or patience to build.
Today, Facebook Co-Founder Mark Zuckerberg is expected to appear in court to defend Oculus and explain that the company's own work made it the successful VR technology it is nowadays.
We'll keep you up to date with any and all developments on this thorny litigation. Stay tuned.
About the author: With over two decades of experience in gaming journalism, Alessio Palumbo has led the gaming vertical at Wccftech since August 2015. He started working at a young age for Italian websites like Everyeye.it, Gamestar.it, Nextgame.it, and Multiplayer.it before kickstarting the indie English-language publication Worlds Factory as its founder and Editor in Chief. In the last decade, he has coordinated the overall output of Wccftech's gaming section, managed PR relations, assigned reviews, produced daily news coverage, edited gaming content as needed, and delivered game reviews. Arguably, his trademark content is the long series of exclusive developer interviews that have been cited by Wikipedia and by the biggest news media and gaming publications. His passion for technology also makes him knowledgeable when it comes to gaming hardware and tech. His favorite genres include RPGs, MMORPGs, and action/adventure games.
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