There’s good news for fans of the online word game Scrabulous — after being taken off social networking site Facebook, it is back in a new avatar. The game is pretty much the same — except for the name, Lexulous — and for those playing it when it went off, unfinished games and points have been retained.
Scrabulous, which became a rage following its launch on Facebook, was taken off after
Hasbro, who held the rights to the word game Scrabble, filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the founders of the online game — brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla — and their company RJ Softwares. After a battle in court, the Agarwallas were allowed to continue with their version, but only after a small change. “We were allowed to continue with our version, as long as we changed the name, since the earlier one (Scrabulous) seemed identical to the original name (Scrabble),” confirms Jayant. On December 12, Hasbro withdrew the lawsuit.
After certain aspects were modified, the game was re-launched on New Year’s Eve.
Within minutes, fans started expressing their joy. Posts on the home page ranged from ‘WOOOHOOO’ to ‘You guys just made my day’ to ‘I hope you got a lot of money from the lawsuit.’ One fan wanted to ensure that all legal issues had been ironed out because ‘kicking the addiction once was hard enough. Don’t think I’d wanna do it again.’
Jayant says that 32,000 of the original four million users have already started finishing incomplete games and the others will get a notification announcing its return from the website soon. “The Facebook team has been very supportive through the whole phase,” says Jayant.
