Thread by @michaelharriot

Everyone is using this bird site to shine a light on work stolen from black creators but if you want to hear something crazy, here's a story that I've known about for years but paid no attention to.

A (non-history) thread:

My best friend had two brothers, the youngest, Kelvin, was much younger than us. He was young and had too much energy, so they tried their best to ignore him but he was always around.

But, because he was always around, I'd have long conversations with Kelvin.

I would also play video games with him because his brothers were very competitive and hated losing. And Kevin would literally study the code of the games, find all the quirks and use it to his advantage. And he was unapologetic about it, too.

Now I would never tell my friends this, but I knew Kelvin was the smartest than them. He was quiet while his brothers were loud AF. Plus, he spent all his time building shit from scratch and could take electronics apart, fix them, improve them, the kid was smart AF.

Anyway, both of the older brothers enlisted in the military and I went to college, leaving Kelvin in our little SC hometown.

But when I would come home from college, even if his brothers weren't home, I'd stop by and holla at him. He was a teenager and he had another problem:

This lil' nigga got handsome.

Now this was the mid-90's and the lil dude had the Allen Iverson braids, bought a little car, fixed the shit up himself, put some rims on it and created a sound system from scratch.

But he started telling me this batshit story.

Every time I saw him, he would SWEAR that the people who made the Sega Genesis video game had ripped him off.

I didn't want to doubt the little dude but umm.... I doubted the little dude. But he kept telling me that he had created a video game and they stole it from him.

Again, dude was pretty smart with the electronics and was very diligent but he was just a kid. I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone say "Hey, I had that idea."

Shit, I sweatergawd that I invented the iPod. Seriously. One day I was drinking a 40 and told my friends:

"They should make a walkman that's just a hard drive that can save mp3s." Next thing you know, Steve Jobs had somehow stolen my idea. Everyone had one of these stories. But here's the thing:

I'm from what some people would call "the hood."

Now, I ain't no gangsta or nothing. But when you're known as the nerd who left the hood and went to college, you could cure cancer, build a microtransmitter and plug the hole in the Ozone layer, but if someone asks those niggas in the hood about you, they will always say:

"I think Mikey's like a lawyer or something. "

So, of course, Kelvin thought I could help him bring the whole Sega company to its knees. And he didn't drink or smoke, so he never forgot.

So every year or so, Kelvin would contact me and ask when we were gonna get together and sue Sega about that game they stole from him.

I'd always give him a bullshit answer and we'd start talking about some other shit. I even gave him the number of my lawyer friends a few times

But he never let that shit go. For 20-something years, he would bug me about that shit. Now, he knew enough about the law to keep bugging Sega or write a letter every few years so he could restart the statute of limitations on his delusional idea.

I ran into him a year ago and he was trying to explain to me how to disassemble a smart tv and turn it into a server that could get any channel but I had a bottle of whiskey and a cigar and my homeboys was cooking on the grill, so... You know.

Well, anyway, he called me again a few days ago because, like I said earlier, everyone is talking about how people steal the work of black creatives. I saw that I missed his call and I knew what he wanted but before I could call him back, his brother texted me.

He was like: I'mma send you all the documents and see what you can do. And I was like "Documents? This nigga had documents?"

But he did have documents.

I didn't even look at them because, I've heard this story for literally 20-plus years. But late last night I opened the email.

Y'all.

Y'all.

Y'all...

They stole this nigga shit.

ALL of it.

EVERY SINGLE PIECE.

First of all, I didn't know (OK, maybe he told me, but I probably didn't pay attention) that he TOLD SEGA ABOUT HIS IDEA. So here is the story:

In '93, 13-year-old Kelvin writes a letter on notebook paper to SEGA telling them his idea for a football video game called "Primetime"

Now this kid knows that Sega's processors have now advanced enough that they can have stuff no other game has like weather, substitutions, injuries, different stadiums, and even turf or grass

Then he goes on to explain the game design, including the code for actions etc. But the shit that floored me was this page:

Well, TWO YEARS later, Sega comes out with a game that is coincidentally called NFL Primetime.

Here is the first screen

The game with the SAME NAME ran for 7 years on 3 different platforms—the Sega Genesis, the first PlayStation and the PlayStation 2.

Again, it started in '95, two years after Kelvin said he came up with his idea and told someone at Sega about it.

There are other pages of details that I don't understand because I don't play video games.

And, to be fair, SEGA probably gets a million of these ideas. They probably didn't even read Kelvin's letter. But I kept reading and saw this:

Now, I'm not a lawyer, I'm just a yahoo with a Twitter account but I've seen enough episodes of Law & Order to know they stole my lil' homie's shit.

Anyway, if anyone here practices intellectual property law, DM me. I might have a case for you.