Royal Mail's new video game stamp set | Hacker News Reader

Royal Mail's new video game stamp set

digitalartsonline.co.uk

104 pointswallflower31 comments

>"All the screenshots were taken using a PC running emulators which ‘emulate’ the original system," Sam continues. "From here, we could play through the games and take multiple screenshots at key moments.

>[...]

>"We also worked with a guy who was an expert in ripping assets from games such as fonts, which were then used as the game titles where possible."

I'd like to have seen something about how they approached the companies for copyright permissions, what emulators the companies endorsed for them to run the games on, etc., whether the companies who owned the copyright currently had the assets but they weren't usable or didn't have the assets (kinda weird to own the copyright on something you don't even have a copy of yourself).

Seems like there's a few interesting bits (heh!) of information there.

Note that even for personal use these things are verbotten in UK copyright law.

In the UK the Queen herself is exempt from a lot of law so maybe the Royal Mail used her prerogatives to just say fuck it.

Royal Mail is a private company now, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Mail#Privatisation.

All of a sudden Brexit makes a little bit more sense.

You do get some odd hangovers in these former civil service companies - I could see the GPO having some carve outs via "crown immunity"

Also I believe a few decades ago the Mexican state oil company had a big spill and relied on sovereign immunity to avoid the consequences

The Queen does not run the Royal Mail.

She did when it was in public ownership

But it isn’t now so it doesn’t apply to this conversation about these stamps.

Obviously you haven't worked for the Civil service or an ex civil service org then

I don’t really understand what you mean, sorry. In what sense do you think the Royal Mail is able to employ Royal prerogative in this case? The Crown doesn’t normally ignore copyright laws.

The rule of law was strengthened in 1947, allowing the Crown to face tort proceedings; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Proceedings_Act_1947 .

But, as others have said, the Royal Mail plc. is not the Crown nor Monarch.

They do touch on rights here briefly:

"The choices were made with factors such as licensing ease..."

Although it sounds like maybe they did the work and then approached the licensing matters (which would be strictly speaking the wrong way round)

They risk wasted effort if they can't get permission, that's all.

No, copying without a license is a tort. Distribution is usually the point when it's found out. But it's the copying that is tortuous.

You're saying that running an emulator on a PC violates UK copyright law? Even if the game is loaded into the emulator from the original media?

I'd be interested in a source for that.

Well media shifting in UK is tortuous (without a license from the copyright holder) -- it was briefly legal a couple of years ago, but the liberalisation was reversed -- so you'd have to be using the original media. Elite on BBC was on tape (LOAD "PROG" !), so you'd need to load from the tape. I'm not sure about the legality of emulators, as long as you don't copy without a license to make them then they should be OK; it's not something I've looked at the caselaw on though. Emulation might be ruled out by user licenses, but I think in the case of Elite, say, that they'd predate the notion of running games under emulation. Nintendo presumably wouldn't license newer copies and allow emulation.

I'd doubt that they loaded it from an original tape.

Nostalgia for old games and TV/Film is a massive thing at the moment (and probably always, going forward) but copyright law's extensive life+70 protection periods has a chilling effect on the lawful enjoyment of such nostalgia in my personal opinion.

"We also worked with a guy who was an expert in ripping assets from games such as fonts, which were then used as the game titles where possible."

I wonder if this was Foone[1].

[1]: https://twitter.com/Foone

Love that Elite is 2nd Class. Very clever.

I don't get it? Was that a class in the game?

As a 2nd class stamp. Since there's two class of mail in the Royal Mail system, there's two class of stamps, more or less expensive.

Loves these, memories!

Available from source:- https://shop.royalmail.com/special-stamp-issues/video-games

UK YouTuber Ashens made a video showcasing and talking about the set https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0eLZGtfHDE

These look beautiful, never would have thought the freaking Worms would be on a post stamp!

Donkey Kong Country would be a great addition for the next batch of these.

Sensible Soccer! The game where you ran away from the ball if you went the wrong direction. I loved that game (although I'm not sure which part of the series). It's on GOG, as well.

Omg... I can't believe they have Wipeout!

Insanely cool and they look very well designed. Might order from outside the UK..!

I'm living in Finland these days, but seeing the Dizzy image definitely made me want to buy a set. I've good memories of playing all the Dizzy games on my ZX Spectrum, back in the day.

I just bought some, and found that delivery to Denmark was free (!).

(Or else their website was broken. It took 6 tries before my credit card was accepted, possibly because of the Øs in "København Ø".)

Four different Tomb Raider stamps and all have occluded cleavage. Impressive.

At least for the PS1 pictures, it's the usual camera angle when playing the game, so that's not particularly egregious.

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