The Shady Side Of Sega

Peddling cigarettes to children is a problem, but you know what's even worse? Peddling cigarettes to children even when the company that makes the cigarettes doesn't want you to. And yet, neither trademark concerns nor common decency stopped Sega from cramming the arcade game Grand Monaco GP full of ads for Marlboro-brand smokes without permission from Marlboro's parent company, Philip Morris.

Okay, sure, technically Grand Monaco GP's in-game signs read "Marlbobo" and not "Marlboro," but the font, color, and general layout of the ads are basically the same as Philip Morris' cigarette logo. When you're busy racing around the track, you're not going to notice a simple spelling mistake. Dr. John W. Richards, who filed the complaint about Grand Monaco GP's in-game ads with the FTC, estimated that a decent player will run across hundreds of bootleg Marlboro ads during a single Grand Monaco GP session.

Naturally, Philip Morris washed its hands of the in-game ads — back in the late '80s, cigarette companies were already facing intense criticism for advertising to kids — and sued Sega for copyright infringement. They won. But if Philip Morris and Sega didn't have a publishing deal, how did the Marlboro ads end up in Grand Monaco GP in the first place? Sega's David Rosen chalked it up to an "innocent attempt to mimic real-life" F1 races, which are full of ads for booze and cigarettes — and yet, somehow, are still considered child-friendly.

Sega doesn't just develop video games. It runs restaurants, too, and wouldn't you know it, they're just as sketchy as some of the company's more high-tech products. In 2013, 19 Japanese eateries managed and run by Sega Entertainment came under scrutiny for misleading customers, specifically by listing ingredients on the menu that weren't used in the final product.

For example, menus Sega's dart-themed Bee restaurants promised diners organic vegetables, premium diced steak, and meals prepared with locally-grown food from Japan's Hokkaido prefecture. However, many of the ingredients were grown overseas, meat options were beefed up with tallow (a.k.a. fat gathered from animal byproducts), and the tomatoes were just regular old tomatoes, with nothing special about 'em. On its own, that's not too bad, but the cheaper ingredients weren't reflected on the check. Affected dishes still carried premium price tags, and many ripped-off customers ended up paying for higher-quality food than they received, going home none the wiser.

Sega attributed the mix-up to an outdated menu and offered disenfranchised customers coupons for free meals — because after a restaurant rips you off and serves you low-quality food in order to make a quick buck, the first thing you want to do is go eat there again. Thanks, Sega, but no thanks. We'll take our business elsewhere.

Savvy video game fans know that most trade show demos are fake, but few are as egregiously misleading as the ones promoting Aliens: Colonial Marines. In a series of hands-off demonstrations of "actual gameplay," Sega and Gearbox showed press and consumers a gorgeous game that accurately captured the look and feel of James Cameron's sci-fi action flick.

Then, the game arrived. Instead of a slick shooter, Aliens: Colonial Marines was ugly and unsophisticated. The demo had a number impressive graphical flourishes, like detailed textures and dynamic lighting. In the final game, they weren't there. Whole levels were missing, and the highly-touted artificial intelligence was as dumb as rocks. Bugs — as in glitches, not aliens — ended up being Colonial Marines' biggest obstacles. Basically, for years Sega promoted one game, and then delivered something wildly different.

In the aftermath, stories about friction between Gearbox and Sega and outsourcing scandals helped explain where things went wrong, but by then it was too little, too late. Critics panned Colonial Marines, while customers retaliated with a lawsuit that accused Sega and Gearbox of false advertising — one that Sega found compelling enough that the company tentatively agreed to pay $1.25 million to pissed off fans.

Shady developers have released all kinds of bootleg Sonic the Hedgehog games on the Android app store, but at the very least, you'd expect Sega's official Sonic apps to respect its customers' privacy. You'd be wrong. According to Pradeo, a mobile security company, three of Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog apps are gathering user information and sharing it on the 'net — and it's not clear who, exactly, is benefitting from the exchange.

Specifically, Pradeo claims that Sonic Dash, Sonic Dash 2: Sonic Boom, and Sonic the Hedgehog Classic are collecting location and device data from users' mobile devices and sending the information to various servers, including at least three that Pradeo calls "uncertified." Even worse, Pradeo has identified two issues that could lead to "man-in-the-middle" attacks, as well as a handful of other security holes. All in all, the affected Sonic apps have about 15 vulnerabilities each.

This isn't a small problem, either. Sonic the Hedgehog is very, very popular, and up to 600 million users might be affected. In response to Pradeo's report, Sega told ZDNet that it's looking into the problems and will fix any issues that it runs across. Still, given that Sega had no idea that this information was exposed before Pradeo's article came out, it's not a great look for Sonic's home company, especially in light of all of the other sketchy things that Sega has done.

There's a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog fan art out there. Some of it's decent. A lot of it isn't. Occasionally, however, it's great — like, for example, DeviantArt user Lightning-Duchess' portrait of Sonia, which was so good that Sega decided to put it in an official Sonic video game. There's just one problem: they didn't get Lighting-Duchess' permission first.

Lightning-Duchess' drawing of Sonia, which is based on her look in the Sonic Underground episode "The Price of Freedom," appears in the Wii version of Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing (and pops up as a low-resolution texture on the PC port, too). You can see it on the floor in the Roulette Road course, specifically on the queen of diamonds playing card. Naturally, Lightning-Duchess wasn't credited for her work, her name was cropped out of the image, and, given that it's fanart, she doesn't have any legal way of fighting against Sega's art theft.

At least she got an apology. As Duchess (real name Riana Dorsey) explained on DeviantArt, Sumo Digital's Steve Lycett reached out to the artist and explained that a level designer mistook Dorsey's picture for an official drawing and put it in the game, and when Sega told Sumo to remove the art, the studio forgot to do so on the Wii and PC versions of the game. Lycett apologized on behalf of the level designer, Dorsey accepted, and both went their separate ways.

Look, Batman, Spider-Man, Rambo, Godzilla, and the Terminator are all awesome characters, and seeing them all in a single-game would be great. Thanks to rights issues, however, it'll never happen — at least, not officially. Unofficially, though, Sega's already gone ahead and tossed them all (and a few others) into a single title. After all, as we've seen, if Sega wants to do something they're not going to let pesky things like "laws" get in the way.

Back in the day, the side-scrolling Genesis title Revenge of Shinobi was famous for its demanding platforming and unforgiving difficulty, but it's probably best known these days as an example of blatant and unapologetic copyright infringement. As director Noriyoshi Ohba explains, the team wanted to make an action game that felt "like a Hollywood action film," and Ohba based some quick enemy designs on popular characters. Unfortunately, Shinobi's main artist didn't realize that Ohba's sketches were supposed to be guidelines, not rules. The end result was a game filled with other people's characters, one that Sega decided to go ahead and release anyway. "Back then, copyright wasn't as strictly enforced," Ohba admits.

Except that it was enforced, and over time, Sega was forced to put out five different versions of Revenge of Shinobi to keep the lawyers at bay. Godzilla became a skeleton. Batman became a demon. Spider-Man stayed intact for a while (Sega actually had the rights to put that character in a game), but Sega had to add Marvel's copyright information to the game's credits, and he was eventually replaced by a pink doppelganger anyway. 

Look, watching a ninja fight all of those guys is pretty cool, but copyrights exist for a reason. You can't just ignore them, even if — especially if — you're Sega.