'Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness' Allegedly Ripped Off An Indie Game
We've been covering instances of movies ripping off video games for a long time now, but those are usually cases of huge films ripping off games of at least considerable size. That's not the case here, as Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness has allegedly ripped off its most memorable scene from an indie game made by a single person. In order to avoid getting too spoiler-y for the two people who went to see Morbius instead of this, the scene in question has Doctor Strange facing off against an alternate version of himself, an evil Strange who likes to play musical instruments when he's not busy with his day job of murdering other versions of himself.
The confrontation is a beautiful CGI fest where they throw musical notes at one another until the bad guy dies in a surprisingly gory manner. It's such a great scene that it makes viewers forget that they just saw the guitar legend of Doctor Stranges getting owned by an alternate version who probably just played Guitar Hero once. Though neat, many are noticing similarities between that scene and the moves from Sword Of Symphony, a game so Indie that it's made by Stephen Strange Ddungu, a one-man-army of a dev whom we're just going to assume could do without having his work getting drowned by a sea of Disney noise.
Ddungu knows that his game was inspired by other JRPGs, like the Kingdom Hearts series, and he also knows that the idea of using music to destroy stuff isn't a new concept either – musicians have been doing that since they invented the ‘80s. This, however, is different, as many of Dr. Strange’s moves seem directly lifted from Ddungu's game. To make Ddungu's case even stronger, he says that he found out that the musical battle from Strange wasn't in the original cut of the film, but rather added during the film's reshoots that took place 3 months after Sword Of Symphony had started to gain praise. Ddungu seems like a pretty cool guy and isn't interested in taking legal action, but he could certainly use seeing his game getting the recognition that Disney allegedly knows it deserves.
Movie companies can be pretty nasty about these things, but they can also make amends. Let's hope they take the cue from Guillermo Del Toro, the awesome Blade 2 director who actually paid the artist whose work had been ripped off in the original Blade film.
Top Image: Disney
