Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: entertainment, games, john carmack, oculus, palmer luckey, video games, vr

Oculus Creator Palmer Luckey Viciously Accused Of Being Fake (And More) By Bethesda's Parent Company In Lawsuit

Back in 2014, word of ZeniMax suing Oculus got out, with the company claiming that the Rift was designed based off of technology, code and knowleege that was stolen from them.

Well, that story has come roaring back in a pretty viscious way. As spotted by GameInformer, that lawsuit has been amended with some pretty direct accusations about Oculus, Palmer Luckey and John Carmack. There is a lot to it, so I'll try and just hit the important parts for you.

The lawsuit now says that John Carmack copied 'thousands of documents' to a USB before he left the company for Oculus, right before he left his time at ZeniMax, as well as later returned to take a 'customized tool for developing VR Technology.'

On a more bizarre,and barbed accusation. the lawsuit now says that Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe invented Luckey as a fiction for the press, and that he is more or less a fake. They said:

Oculus, at Iribe's direction, disseminated to the press the false and fanciful story that Luckey was the brilliant inventor of VR technology who had developed that technology in his parents' garage. In fact, that story was utterly and completely false: Luckey lacked the training, expertise, resources, or know-how to create commercially viable VR technology, his computer programming skills were rudimentary, and he relied on ZeniMax's computer program code and games to demonstrate the prototype Rift. Nevertheless, this fraudulent tale was frequently reported in the media as fact. Luckey increasingly and falsely held himself out to the media and the public as the visionary developer of the Rift's VR Technology, which had actually been developed by ZeniMax without any substantial contribution from Luckey.

That is brutally scathing.

There are also parts that say Luckey broke NDA about the tech, and that Facebook knowingly closed on their $2 Billion acqusition of the company despite those NDAs.

There is a lot to this lawsuit, so if you want the nitty gritty, head over to GI.

Oculus have responded saying:

This complaint filed by ZeniMax is one-sided and conveys only ZeniMax's interpretation of the story. We continue to believe this case has no merit, and we will address all of ZeniMax's allegations in court.

If even half of these reports are true, there is something really bad going on here for Oculus. The exact and specific nature of the acquisations are quite worrying, but obviously nothing has been confirmed, won, or settled upon in the lawsuit (I want to emphasise that!). This really could be one of the biggest cases in video games in quite some time though and seeing how it plays out will likely shape the future of all VR, if not the industry.

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