Sidam

Sidam was a coin-op maker in Turin that, before it built a single video game, turned out foosball tables, photo-booth cabinets and similar amusements.^[1] In 1978 it began copying arcade video games — Atari’s above all — at a time when Italian law did not yet extend copyright to software, so that cloning a game was widely treated as legal.^[2] Sidam rebuilt hit after hit by reading and reworking the circuit boards rather than the cabinets, and one Italian retro-gaming history remembers it as the “queen of the bootlegs.”^[3] One clone, Rugby, carried the practice even into the video-pinball genre by reskinning Atari’s Video Pinball.

The copying ended in court. Atari, through its Italian concessionaires the Bertolino brothers, sued Sidam for plagiarism over games including Asteroids,^[4] and the court upheld copyright in video games, classing them as works of the intellect in a precedent-setting judgment that punished the plagiarism.^[5] Condemned in 1983, Sidam thereafter built and distributed its games under proper license, trading as SIPEM and continuing to distribute until 2010^[6] — putting out officially licensed Namco titles across Italy, France and the Benelux.^[7] The company itself outlived its games: it survives in Turin today as a maker of industrial ventilation systems.^[8]