Electronic Arts have filed at least 689 patents.
One of them is https://patents.google.com/patent/US10275947B2 (expiring 2035)
That is for the character creation in The Sims 4 where you can drag hotspots on the character (like the tip of their nose, etc) to edit them.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10463967B2 (also expiring 2035) covers mutating a character using random attribute changes from a single character profile, or random mixing of attributes of two parents to generate a child.
Something graphics programmers were annoyed by for a long time was the Marching Cubes patent (expired). It converted an isosurface (mathematical formula, voxel field, distance field, etc) into a triangle mesh.
You can't patent the idea of turning isosurfaces into meshes. But you can patent the explicit method of using cube corner sampling with a lookup table of triangles to do it.
The patent was worked around by making an alternative: Marching Tetrahedrons. Basically the same idea, but with a different shape. That was enough to avoid violating the patent, because the patent was explicitly about using cubes.
When you turn on a Gameboy Advance, the Nintendo logo appears. That's actually part of the copy protection! The GBA checks a certain location on a cartridge for a specific data block. If the block doesn't match what is expected, the GBA won't play the cartridge. That data block is the image data for the Nintendo logo. If you want to make an unofficial cartridge playable, you have to copy that data. But since it's an image, they can sue you for copyright violation. If that fails, the image is also the Nintendo trademark, so they can sue for trademark violation.
I wouldn't be surprised if they had a patent on the method they used to check it too. 🙂
(Nintendo has filed at least 23180 patents)
