Copyright and video games between the games were limited to the plaintiff's ideas. According to the court the similarities, "were inevitable given the requirements of the idea of a game involving a spaceship combating space rocks and given the technical demands of the medium of a video game." In Atari v. North American Philips Consumer Electronics Corp. (1982) the 7th Circuit wrote that "no plagiarist can excuse the wrong by showing how much of his work he did not pirate." This was said in the context of the fact that, "while a game is not protectable by copyright as such, this kind of work
Atari, Inc. the game "Go", Bushnell shared with Dabney his gaming-pizza parlor idea, and had taken him to the computer lab at Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to see the games on those systems. They jointly developed the concept of using a standalone computer system with a monitor and attaching a coin slot to it to play games on. Bushnell and Dabney worked with Nutting Associates to manufacture their product. Dabney developed a method of using video circuitry components to mimic functions of a computer for a much cheaper cost and a smaller space. Bushnell and Dabney used this to develop a variation