copyright - Is it legal to make a commercial improved clone of a ...

In Second Life, there was this board game that I really loved playing that I was only able to find within the Second Life world. I really loved the game, and the only reason I maintained a Second Life character was to log in and play it. Despite this, there are some fatal flaws with it:

a)There is no AI, so (a) human opponent(s) are a requirement.

b)Since it's only available to play on Second Life, you can only play with people who are also on Second Life. The fact that it's a 'game within a game' adds an unnecessary barrier of entry, and Second Life is not quite big enough to be considered mainstream.

c)The game was sold to property owners at one specific shop in Second Life, and it was quite expensive. There was also no official place to play the game. Because of this, locations to play would often appear and then disappear, and you would have to jump between lots where you knew the game was set up to try to find other people playing. There was a group set up so you can find other people who are interested in playing, but a lot of people who played the game weren't in the group or the group would go through long periods of inaction.

Despite these problems, I truly believe that the basic formula of the game could be a hit if a clone was created as a standalone game with some other improvements and changes.

Basically, I want to make an improved version of the game writing my own original source code, using my own original art, and commercializing it. I want to change the theme (for example Pirates instead of Ninjas), modify some gameplay elements and object properties, but still keep the basic premise of the game intact.

A simple example of this is if I wanted to make a game inspired by Pong, but add things like

a)people with ping pong paddles as sprites instead of the paddle sprites

b)If the ball passes through power ups that randomly appear, the person who last hit the ball would earn the power up. An example of this might be that the ball slows down by 50% when it enters your side of the screen for the next 20 seconds.

c)The source code is written organically without copying any code from Pong

The idea is very much like pong, but the creation of the work itself is unique. You could also draw the same comparison between the MMOs World of Warcraft and Rift (I know WoW isn't the first, but it's the biggest)

The original artist of the game I want to revamp originally sold it for profit within Second Life.

So at the end of this wall of text, I ask you, is this legal without permission from the artist of inspiration according to US law? If not, what would have to be done to make it so? Where is the line drawn in a case like this between what is considered an original idea and copyright infringement under US law?

Thanks for reading.

Source: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12786084/is-it-legal-to-make-a-commercial-improved-clone-of-a-game-someone-else-originall

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