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Meanwhile, Electronic Arts was not ignorant of Spark’s plans and when approximately twenty of its people suddenly quit, EA’s legal team went in to action, filing suit against Spark. Electronic Arts claimed that its former employees had helped form Spark while still earning paychecks at EA and further accused them of stealing trade secrets by copying proprietary development software, including source code, libraries of art work, and internally created tools prior to leaving. It would be the first of many lawsuits that would haunt Spark. Electronic Arts’ computer forensics expert reported a number of questionable .zip and .gho files on EA’s network that appeared to be evidence of copying. In a court deposition listing the alleged instances of software theft, he stated “I find it alarming that these gentlemen were in possession of this information as a ‘.zip’ file, which is used to compress large amounts of data into a size for transfer over the Internet or by a medium such as a CD-ROM or DVD.” Among the suspicious zipped files he also discovered “a massive file named ‘JERRY.GHO,’ which appears to be the entire MOHFL [Medal of Honor: Frontline] art asset database. The ‘.gho’ extension indicates it was created using Ghost software, which is capable of copying entire directories or drives.” In its opposition testimony, Spark countered that many examples of copied software could be attributed to errors on the part of EA’s own IT department, answering that “the receipt of a zipped file, and the unzipping process itself, will leave zip files on the recipient’s computer... The presence of zipped files on a computer may indicate that the user has created zipped files to copy onto a CD or to email to another user. However, it also may mean (as it does here) that the user has simply received and extracted zipped files.” Spark went on to point out that “Ghost files are often made by a company’s Information Technology department as a routine part of operations.” Spark further explained that any other files that its people may have copied while at EA were actually work samples to be used in their personal portfolios. Activision had already advanced over a million dollars to Spark and the lawsuit threatened to kill the company before work on Finest Hour could even begin. When the case was settled in April of 2003, both parties agreed to pay their own costs, leaving Activision to foot the bill for Spark’s $850,000 in legal fees. It was not an auspicious start for the developer and their troubles were far from over.
In a 2005 postmortem of Call of Duty: Finest Hour that Craig Allen prepared for Activision called “Looking Back, Planning Ahead” the CEO candidly discussed Spark’s difficulties as a start up developer. A critical early decision that Spark had to make was on Finest Hour’s technology foundation. One of the company’s guiding principles was “empowering artistry through technology,” which ultimately led them to choose Criterion Software’s RenderWare Studio. Allen wrote, “Activision was very concerned about our decision and lobbied for working with them to develop and utilize a system being created called AGE (the Advanced Graphics Engine).” However, Spark’s Chief Technical Officer Adrian Jones disagreed, feeling that AGE “might be good for the graphical pipeline but would not provide the wealth of needed tools for game creation.” Despite Activision’s objections, Spark remained committed to RenderWare. “At first blush, RenderWare seemed like a reasonable choice to get all 30 people at Spark up and running as soon as possible,” Allen wrote. “It seemed to allow for customization and, so the story goes, would allow the engineering team to focus their work on the specific features to be used in the game as opposed to more generalized tools.” |
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