A Letter to BoMbErLiNk by Onyx (SAVE Your Maker)

Dear BoMbErLiNk,

I hope you are well and the words in this letter can reach you. The reason I write is: from a copyright standpoint, there is still a way to save your Maker and you don't have to hide yourself.

First of all, if you received a cease and desist from the SOR copyright holders, you already complied with their legal request by shutting down the SORR project entirely. BUT the game and source code you created from scratch using BennuGD engine (without any kind of reverse engineering as you stated many years go in an interview), custom stages not based on SOR, and the Rudra character is YOURS.

Again, from a copyright standpoint, your mistake was to mix copyrighted content or SOR content with your game and maker. And you can STILL turn around, complying even more with the legal letter you supposedly received. So I leave the suggestion:

1. Remove any copyrighted content from your game and re-release it as BEUMaker (Beat 'Em Up Maker). We, modders from the community have been creating all kinds of games using your maker based on our own characters, own developed stages, and various other games, so many of us would prefer to make totally legal use and various fan use of your maker. Enable us to take this to the next level.

If the user wants to make a SOR mod and release, or a Final Fight mod or anything using copyrighted content, it is the responsability of the user to comply with copyright rights and laws, not yours.

2. Consider releasing it as opensource. If you are tired, and I would understand after so many hard work and code lines, we would be proud to continue your work. Remember just it should not contain any sprites, fonts, music or sound, or trademarked character names from SOR - they must all be replaced. You can use the same license from BennuGD as its license, which you can see from their SourceForge repo is the Zlib license: https://opensource.org/licenses/Zlib
A MIT or 3-Clause BSD license are similar to this one and would fit well for it, so also leave these as suggestions.

Thanks for your gorgeous game and hard work!

Kind Regards
Onyx

I do hope this can be reached into B's eyes. If so, the game can reach a higher point of exposure and keeping it up.

and yes, characters like Rudra, can be copyrighted, but it wasn't B who created her, I forgot who was it.

Don Vecta wrote:and yes, characters like Rudra, can be copyrighted, but it wasn't B who created her, I forgot who was it.

Still the contributor that created Rudra would have to send a request to B asking to remove the character sprites and sounds. Seems highly unlikely to happen

I do hope he gets the message,because there's still alot of things that could be put into SORR like Beta Zan,Max etc,heck maybe a DLC with new enemies,stages & more.

Also think of the things people can do with that engine,we can have a Final Fight Remake!

Beta Max is already in SORR

Lol,crap your right,my bad XD

oracle wrote:Dear BoMbErLiNk,

I hope you are well and the words in this letter can reach you. The reason I write is: from a copyright standpoint, there is still a way to save your Maker and you don't have to hide yourself.

First of all, if you received a cease and desist from the SOR copyright holders, you already complied with their legal request by shutting down the SORR project entirely. BUT the game and source code you created from scratch using BennuGD engine (without any kind of reverse engineering as you stated many years go in an interview), custom stages not based on SOR, and the Rudra character is YOURS.

Again, from a copyright standpoint, your mistake was to mix copyrighted content or SOR content with your game and maker. And you can STILL turn around, complying even more with the legal letter you supposedly received. So I leave the suggestion:

1. Remove any copyrighted content from your game and re-release it as BEUMaker (Beat 'Em Up Maker). We, modders from the community have been creating all kinds of games using your maker based on our own characters, own developed stages, and various other games, so many of us would prefer to make totally legal use and various fan use of your maker. Enable us to take this to the next level.

If the user wants to make a SOR mod and release, or a Final Fight mod or anything using copyrighted content, it is the responsability of the user to comply with copyright rights and laws, not yours.

2. Consider releasing it as opensource. If you are tired, and I would understand after so many hard work and code lines, we would be proud to continue your work. Remember just it should not contain any sprites, fonts, music or sound, or trademarked character names from SOR - they must all be replaced. You can use the same license from BennuGD as its license, which you can see from their SourceForge repo is the Zlib license: https://opensource.org/licenses/Zlib
A MIT or 3-Clause BSD license are similar to this one and would fit well for it, so also leave these as suggestions.

Thanks for your gorgeous game and hard work!

Kind Regards
Onyx

How about a better option...get the best parts of V4, V5, and V 5.1, refine it with the people that made SoR 4, then make it as DLC for that game, so that way, everyone wins?

I can't help but disagree with the headposter's point. He seems to care much more about legal issues than the game's identity. Sure, copyright is cool and all (not really), but.

Streets of Rage Remake must remain Streets of Rage Remake. If it doesn't, there's just no point.

SoR4, unlike previous official games, wasn't even developed or published by SEGA. It was developed by LizardCube and GuardCrush, and published by Dotemu under SEGA's license, much like they published Double Dragon Trilogy under Arc System Works' license.

In their Twitter, the Dotemu team stated that they had played SoRR and enjoyed it greatly. This might mean the game's already got an ally in their face. If Bomberlink or anybody of the SoRR devteam with his permission happens to reach out to Dotemu, they may figure something out.

SoRR may become the Sonic Mania of the franchise - not a sequel, but an expanded medley of its legacy made by fans and acknowledged by its respective owner. Not just another beat'em'up.

We will always have Remake V4 and V5, but "V6" could perhaps become an original game. I think the engine, characters, gameplay, and stage design/maker all deserve success of their own merit. I've played some beat em ups on Steam and have been disappointed with almost all of the ones I tried. I believe Bomberlink is sitting on a remarkable original game, but has perhaps been disheartened by the C&D.

There have been several games in recent years that started off as fan games or unofficial sequels which became their own thing after legal threats.

Iceferno wrote:We will always have Remake V4 and V5, but "V6" could perhaps become an original game. I think the engine, characters, gameplay, and stage design/maker all deserve success of their own merit. I've played some beat em ups on Steam and have been disappointed with almost all of the ones I tried. I believe Bomberlink is sitting on a remarkable original game, but has perhaps been disheartened by the C&D.

There have been several games in recent years that started off as fan games or unofficial sequels which became their own thing after legal threats.

Bomberlink is always gonna be a legend in my eyes, the project they have been improved on a very high level comparing with the classic SOR games.
I want the same thing as all of you do, the latest SORRV5.1 patch was incredible and I am sure Eduard Luna Bolano and his team wanted to put more and more stuffs in this project and probably the extra battle scenes as bike-ride jet-ski parts were in SORMAKER app as well if Sega doesn't shut the project down especially not after 8 years really hard work!
Let's be honest: they won't return I don't think they will ever, this bad move from Sega could have broken
something inside of the Bomberlink team, the disappointment & the clash when they received this memo
seriously I know this feeling and I can imagine what they felt that time!
World is very unfair and always has been!

yeah，sorr is so good，It was so shocking ，I've been playing for 1300 + hours ，It brings me a lot of happy time ，yeah！its cool！！！I'd like to thank the author and all those who are concerned about it

E253MechaShadow wrote:I can't help but disagree with the headposter's point. He seems to care much more about legal issues than the game's identity. Sure, copyright is cool and all (not really), but.

Surely, if Sega wanted to reach a deal and a partnership that would allow it to reach Steam that would be amazing. But this is not what happened - the fan author reportedly received a cease and desist letter.

But perhaps you also misunderstood points in my letter as well. What I was suggesting is... release the Maker with its engine open source without assets/resources that break copyright and allow SORR to become a fan mod, I´m sure it will be our favorite one.

Instead what we have is modders that dream about lots of improvements and extensions that could be made to the Maker but we are unable to do anything because we do not have a source code or official and legal repository to contribute either with code or suggestions.

Hopefully one day,Bomberlink will return,SOR Maker needs an upgrade.

SORDave wrote:Hopefully one day,Bomberlink will return,SOR Maker needs an upgrade.

If he doesn't, perhaps someone will decompile the game and make an unofficial fork (if it has not already happened).

SORDave wrote:Hopefully one day,Bomberlink will return,SOR Maker needs an upgrade

and it happened XD.

lalolanda wrote:

SORDave wrote:Hopefully one day,Bomberlink will return,SOR Maker needs an upgra


and it happened XD.

Yup, and I´m happy it happened. Still, at the same time, it is a bit frustrating that the SORMaker did not receive enough attention and many constraints and expansion to the tool we would love to see has not happened in 5.2

An expansion tool would be sick!

If that ever happened. XD