It appears the Beijing Olympic Committee may have jumped into the inglorious world of Flash game thievery on behalf of its mascots, the ubiquitous Fuwa. According to computer animator Cadin Batrack, a Flash-animation video game called Fuwa Fight the Winter Clouds (“Winter is here! But the sky is gray. Help Fuwa fight the clouds and bring back the blue sky”), recently removed from an official Olympic website, bore a striking resemblance one of the games he developed. Here’s are some screen shots followed by an explanation from Batrack, posted on his site, The Pencil Farm (h/t Danwei):
They downloaded the swf file from my site, decompiled it, swapped out the little guy for the Fuwa characters, took my name off of it and republished it as their own. I can tell this is what happened because they are still using some of my original art from Snow Day (the clouds and the ice cube are exactly the same). I also took the liberty of decompiling their game and actually found it still contains the sound files from Snow Day, even though they aren’t being used in the Olympic version. It even still has the splash sound effect from The Lake (I used the engine from The Lake to make Snow Day and must have forgot to delete this file).
Two of the other games on the Olympic site are obvious rip-offs of Ferry Halim’s Orisinal games. Compare Obstacle Race on the Olympic site with Ferry’s adorable Arctic Blue, and Leap and Leap, a clumsy copy of Winter Bells. I can’t really tell if these are clones or reskinned versions of Ferry’s files, but those stars in Leap and Leap look pretty damn similar to me.
First Sudan, now this…
