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Lawyers for Atari have filed against KitKat’s parent company Nestlé because of a 30 second ad that did a chocoately riff off the classic Atari game Breakout. At least, that’s how Atari sees it, anyway.
Basically, in the ad (which only aired in the UK) a bunch of different people play a game that looks a bit like Breakout, but with KitKat Bites instead of the Breakout bricks.
The complaint that was filed last week alleges that Nestlé has ‘without Atari’s authorization, leverage[d] Breakout and the special place it holds among nostalgic Baby Boomers, Generation X, and even today’s Millenial and post-Millenial “gamers” in order to maximize the reach of worldwide, multi-platform advertisements’.
Maybe it’s because I get slightly annoyed whenever someone puts “gamers” in inverted commas like that, but I’m not really seeing the hardwired link between nostalgia and eating chocolate, to be honest. Perhaps everyone watching the ad really would be like ‘Wow, I wasn’t interested in having a KitKat before, but now I’ve seen a game a bit like Breakout in the advert, my nostalgia is driving me to buy several multipacks!’
In any case, Atari does hold the rights to Breakout, which was created by the Steves, both Jobs and Wosniak, in the 70s, and is claiming infringement and dilution on the trademark.
Nestlé hasn’t responded yet, but in the battle of these two corporate giants we, as spectators, can’t lose. It’s almost as funny as the time Maradona said he was going to sue Konami over PES 2017.
