The drama between Scratch DJ and 7 Studios continues this week, as the Los Angeles County Superior Court again orders the developer to hand over the source code to their game engine.
The court first ordered that all materials pertaining to the Scratch DJ title be returned in an initial ruling on April 20th, which included provisions to prevent 7 Studios from discussing the Scratch DJ project with any other company, including their new parent company Activision. Lawyers for 7 Studios argued during that case over handing over the source code for the project, which included the developers own game engine, but the judge ruled that once the game engine was incorporated into the product it belonged to Scratch DJ.
A couple of weeks later and assets have indeed changed hands, but 7 Studios continues to hold onto the source code containing their engine, hence the judge's re-iteration of the order yesterday.
According to Scratch, once they obtain the source code the company will finally be able to move forward with the publishing of the game.
Jack O'Donnell, Manager of Scratch and Chief Executive Officer of Numark, stated, "We are very excited to finish Scratch – The Ultimate DJ. We hope that this clear victory ends the delay tactics employed by the defendants to date to stop our game from being completed and brought to market. We will continue to vigorously pursue our damages case against Activision, 7 Studios and Peterson resulting from their actions to delay and take over the Scratch game. With the injunction order, we will also now be able to move forward to complete and launch our much anticipated Scratch game."
We're still pretty skeptical that Scratch will ever see the light of day at this point, but hey - nice turntable.