It seems that controversy follows Dong Nguyen wherever he goes. Previously there were reports that Nguyen’s game, Flappy Bird, stole images from Nintendo’s games, although in all fairness Nintendo denied that they sent Nguyen legal notices. Now with Nguyen’s latest game, Swing Copters, the developers at Open Name claim the game is a ripoff of their own Bog Racer.
Interestingly enough Bog Racer was released in July but apparently during Google’s zeal at removing all clones/copycats of Swing Copters, Bog Racer was caught in the crossfire despite it being released first. Speaking to Pocket Gamer, the developers claim that Nguyen had “heavily borrowed” the ideas of Bog Racer to apply to Swing Copters.
However in a statement made by Nguyen in response to their claims, “Swing Copters project is exist since February 2014. It names Kitty Jetpackat that time. You can see the screenshot of it on Rolling Stonemagazine published in March 2014.” He adds, “I am sure this is a coincidence of two games use the same mechanism. But looking in game design aspect, these two games are different games.”
As for Open Name, they are hoping to get Nguyen’s game removed from app stores. “We will use all of our modest means to restore justice, and we intend to apply a request that Swing Copters be removed from the app stores. We are well aware that our chances are very slim, which is why we ask for the support of everyone who is partial to our cause.”
Will they be successful? We guess we’ll have to wait and see, but in the meantime you can check out the trailer to Bog Racer in the video above. What do you guys think? Coincidence or a ripoff?
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