And now, the latest in the drama-filled case between Genius Products and 7 Studios, all over the upcoming release Scratch: The Ultimate DJ Game.

A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge has ordered that 7 Studios hand over all work associated with Scratch, including source code, works-in-progress and all of the developer's pre-existing Tool and Technology (including 7 Studios' game engine).

The judge also issued a Temporary Restraining order in favour of Genius and Numark Industries (now trading jointly as Scratch DJ Game LLC), which states that 7 Studios and parent company Activision must be "walled off" from discussing any details about Scratch - either with each other or with any third party. Until this point, 7 Studios as defendant were still withholding game development materials, including source code and the pre-existing Tools and Technology.

Jack O’Donnell, Manager of Scratch and Chief Executive Officer of Numark, stated:

“We are very excited to finish Scratch – The Ultimate DJ. We hope that this clear victory ends the delay tactics employed by the defendants to date to stop our game from being completed and brought to market. We will continue to vigorously pursue our damages case against Activision, 7 Studios and Peterson resulting from their actions to delay and take over the Scratch game. With the injunction order, we will also now be able to move forward to complete and launch our much anticipated Scratch game.”

To recap, after Genius and Numark refused to sell Scratch: The Ultimate DJ to Activision earlier this year, Activision pulled out their wallets and instead bought the financially-stressed "work for hire" developer, 7 Studios. The developer, now under Activision's control, then refused to hand over any game code for Scratch, and attempted to prevent Genius and Numark from gaining access to the source code for the game engine.

These actions lead the court to find that 7 Studios have breached their Developer Agreement with Genius and Numark, which then resulted in the court ruling that all assets, source code and pre-existing Tools and Technology should be handed back to Genius and Numark.


Is this the end? Who knows... we got word last week that Activision's own DJ Hero is edging closer and closer to release, eying off a "spring" release date, how will Scratch stand up, in the end? Will this court case achieve what Activision set out to do originally - delay the competition?