Uniracers lawsuit

Uniracers is a racing game released for the mh:awesomegames:Super Nintendo Entertainment System, released in 1994 in North America and a year later in PAL regions with the title Unirally and was developed by DMA Design and published by mh:awesomegames:Nintendo. The game received favorable reviews when it first came out and people who have played it years later called it a fun racing game. The game has unfortunately received low sales due to a lawsuit from Pixar which prevented the game to receive the sales it deserved.

In 1987, Pixar released a computer animated short called Red's Dream which stars a unicycle. Upon seeing Uniracers, Pixar sued Nintendo and DMA Design because they made the argument that the unicycles in Uniracers were copied from Red's Dream.

The judge ruled in favor of Pixar and ordered Nintendo to stop producing anymore cartridges. Nintendo hasn't made any references to the game and has been unable to re-release it ever since the court ruling. Interestingly, Uniracers isn't even listed in the chronicle in the North American or PAL versions of Super Smash Bros. Brawl even though it lists games with real-life player names in North America and games developed by Rare in PAL regions before they were bought by Microsoft.

Video game designer and one of the founders of DMA Design Mike Dailly said "We modeled the unicycle exactly, based on a real life unicycle. The problem with Pixar was that they seemed to think that any computer generated unicycle was owned by them. They took footage from Red's Dream and compared it to Unirally and the unicycles were virtually the same; this isn't a big surprise as there’s not a lot of ways you can bring life to a unicycle without looking like the one Pixar did. The judge - being the moron that he was - agreed. While it was a unicycle, and did look similar, I think he should have looked at the game as a whole. If he had, then he would have noticed that the game was a completely different environment, and the 'character' of the unicycle just wasn't the same."

Programmer Andrew Innes told Nintendo Life that there were talks of a 3D version which would of made Uniracers into a franchise but thanks to the verdict of the lawsuit, it will never happen.