Early video game copyright history was also a lot more loosy goosie. Bethesda cut its teeth on Terminator licensed games, because no one really cared about video games and corpus would give away licensing rights for a song.

If you look at early gaming history, there’s a lot of stuff that wouldn’t fly today copyright wise. (Iirc Nethack has enemies from Tron, folks very happily made and distributed Star Trek fan games - heck, in the early 00’s you could buy unofficial mod packs for video games in stores.)