For those of you who haven’t followed the saga of Tim Langdell, here’s his story. Back in the eighties he had a company called Edge Games. At this time, he had the word “Edge” trademarked. Still does. Ever gotten the idea to trademark a word just to make people pay for using it? We’ve all had that idea. Tim Langdell’s the man who did it. He’s still harassing other companies for using that trademark. His biggest claim to fame is for harassing Apple to take the acclaimed game EDGE off of the iTunes store, a highly reviewed independent game. Essentially, this is nothing but a cheap way to stifle creativity. The game creators offered to change the name to Edgy, but he still harassed and then attempted to trademark EDGY.

Here’s his website. http://www.edgegames.com/. Notice that under the “comics” section he attempts to take credit for several Marvel (I guess now Disney) comics that use the name Edge. On the main page, he used to have a banner that said “A new game MIRRORS by EDGE.” Arguably, this man is the worst figure in the video game industry. Occasionally I’ll give that position to the sexy tasty Bobby Kotick of Activision, but he’s not in the news today.

Finally, EA Games has petitioned for trial against Tim (remember Mirror’s Edge) for his Edge trademark. Obviously a giant such as EA doesn’t see much benefit from this, which could be thought as a move largely with the VG development community in mind as a whole. So what sayeth you? Are Tim Langdell’s days of harassing the Video Game Industry finally coming to a close? Or more importantly, is this another move out of recent ones that have been largely beneficial to EA in their re-emergence as a bona-fide original and fantastic gaming company (including the creation of all new and original IP’s such as Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space).

EA: Since 1982. Original since 2008

tl;dr Does Electronic Arts care about gamers again or is it all a ruse like Sonic Team’s insistence that they’ll make a good Sonic game?