The creator of TxK says Atari is trying to get the Vita game pulled from sale, and has prevented him from releasing it on new platforms.

In a post on his official site (copied to Pastebin after his site crashed), Llamasoft founder Jeff Minter accuses Atari of preventing the game’s release by threatening legal action it knows he cannot afford.

He also said Atari wants the game removed from sale on Vita “even though it’s plainly at the end of its run now and only brings in a trickle these days”.

TxK was going to be released on PC, PlayStation 4, Oculus Rift, GearVR, and Android platforms before Atari stepped in.

According to Minter, Atari accused him of stealing the source code for Tempest 2000 – a Tempest clone Minter coded for Atari in 1994 – in order to create TxK.

“I wrote the source code for Tempest 2000, and didn't need to refer to it at all to create TxK, even if I still had it,” he said.

Minter said Atari also suggested that the soundtracks of the two games were identical despite the TxK soundtrack being an award-winning original work, and that both games contain a ship that can jump and an AI drone.

“Apparently Atari owns jumping,” he wrote, adding, “There has been an AI Droid in almost every game I've made since Llamatron. Which I made 3 years before Tempest 2000.

“Basically most of it came down to ‘looks like Tempest 2000’," he said.

“[It's] all abject bollocks, but set up legally so as to be expensive for anyone to contest.”

According to Minter, he was negotiating with Atari a while back to try and work something out, but to no avail.

“I even thought maybe they might be interested in my doing updated versions of some of the other Atari IP,” he said.

“After all i do have a track record of doing decent reworkings of old games like theirs and I'd've really enjoyed a crack at some of those old things.

“However they never gave an inch and just continued with threats and bullying."

Speaking with Game Informer, Atari denied that it legal action was underway, but suggested that TxK was a blatant Tempest 2000 rip-off.

“Atari values and protects its intellectual property and expects others to respect its copyrights and trademarks,” it said in a statement.

“When Llamasoft launched TxK in early 2014, Atari was surprised and dismayed by the very close similarities between TxK and the Tempest franchise.

“Atari was not alone in noticing the incredible likeness between the titles. Several major gaming outlets also remarked at the similarity of features and overall appearance of TxK to Tempest; one stated of TxK, ‘This is essentially Tempest.’

“There is no lawsuit. Atari has been in continuous contact with the developer since the game launched in hopes that the matter would be resolved.”

Minter denies that last point, and believes he's being singled out while Atari allows direct clones of Tempest 2000 in app stores.

"I can only think that I am being singled out for hostile treatment precisely because I am the original creator of Tempest 2000," he said.

"To be turned on by a bunch of strangers bearing the name of a company I once loved, and to have my own seminal work used as a weapon against me, is beyond sickening. These people are despicable."

"The lawyers' letter is also comedically disingenuous and is bizarrely couched in terms which seek to imply that I had only a minor role in the creation of a game that I coded and designed entirely myself and which is known as one of my seminal works," he added.

"Given such a bizarre and blatant attempt to diminish my role in the creation of my own game I do not feel inclined to trust or deal with such people as representatives of fake-Atari. I do not consider threatening letters from lawyers to be 'contact with the developer' by fake-Atari. Let them speak to me face to face."

Minter also accused Atari of renaming the PlayStation port of Tempest 2000 to Tempest X in order to avoid paying him royalties.