A Technical Board of Appeal (TBA) has held that a games machine which varies the probability of a character in a computer game is patentable.
The invention was in the form of a program which related to a clock the result of which was a time dependant random event generator – this thus created a random effect and technical.
The ground for refusal on appeal was the exclusion of “games rules” defined as a condition agreed to by the players – this invention however, did not concern the rule per se and it was not disclosed to the player(s).