The game, titled
OpenSC2K, was released on GitHub earlier this year and received quite a bit of attention on sites such as Reddit and
Hacker News.
While it is billed as an "open source" version, the remake did include original artwork, belonging to Electronic Arts. These images and sounds are definitely not free to use, something the developer is fully aware of now.
A few days ago Electronic Arts sent a DMCA takedown notice to GitHub asking the platform to remove the infringing repository from its site.
"Assets from the game SimCity 2000 are being infringed upon,"
EA writes. The company points out that the game can be purchased legally
through Origin where it's still being sold for a few dollars.
While OpenSC2K is far from a full remake, Electronic Arts makes it clear that the SimCity 2000 assets are not for public use.
"The current audiovisual output of the repository creates content that infringes on Electronic Arts copyright. As long as that continues to happen, no other changes other than removal is sufficient to address the infringement," the company writes.
Soon after this DMCA notice was submitted, OpenSC2K was indeed taken offline, replaced with GitHub's standard DMCA notification.
This is also the reason why the developer came up with an asset conversion tool early on. That would make it possible to replace the original artwork with open source content, however, due to some code changes and other priorities, this hasn't happened yet.
"The assets are not freely licensed but are currently being included. I have a working asset conversion tool that can pull the original game art from the game files, but I've since pushed out a complete rewrite of the engine that broke a few things," the developer
wrote.
