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Excuse me, you're sitting on my name:
Microsoft branding strategy provokes
trademark lawsuit from Virginia company.

Mythic Entertainment's "The Dark Age of Camelot" -- called by a UK reviewer "horrifyingly addictive and a total blast to play."

ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA, Dec. 28, 2003. When is your company name not your name? When the biggest company in the business decides the name of your little company would make a great name for a new massively multiplayer online game. Mythic Entertainment of Fairfax, VA isn't taking it lying down.

Last April Microsoft announced that Microsoft Game Studios was coming out with a new game called Mythica, in which "you play a warrior spirit recruited by the Norse gods themselves." What they left out of the announcement was that the Norse gods already were hard at work in Mythic Entertainment's Dark Age of Camelot, already a massively multiplayer game with 250,000 subscribers.

Mythic Entertainment has filed suit in the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, VA claiming that Microsoft has illegally made off with its corporate name and asking for unspecified damages and a permanent injunction prohibiting Microsoft from using Mythica to identify its game.

In the suit, Mythic makes the argument that Microsoft's use of "Mythica" is causing gamers to "confuse or mistake Microsoft's goods and services for those offered by Mythic." Of course, Microsoft has added that little letter "a" at the end of Mythic, so they're not exactly the same, are they?

The last time Microsoft attempted to break into the massively multiplayer game market, it was with a game called Asheron's Call, which was not exactly a screaming commercial success. In fact, it was just announced that Turbine Entertainment, the creator of Asheron's Call, is buying back the franchise from Microsoft. As one of the game's players explains, "The game should definitely improve now that Microsoft is losing control over it."