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I'd bet it's hard to break-even once you've done the work of converting them. First, almost nobody is going to pay $60 for them, like people did decades ago. The bar for computer games has been raised, and the market is full of people trying to sell games. (It's also possible that the developers of those old games created them because they liked making games, even if the pay was bad. For someone wanting to make a decent living-wage, this type of game might not be the way to go - i.e. only create them if you've got lots of interest, a day-job, and lots of free time.) Second, it's hard to find your target audience. A few years back, I had written a strategy-wargame ( http://www.empiresofsteel.com/ ) which was inspired in many ways by an old computer game called "Empire" ( http://www.classicempire.com/ ). My revenue was nowhere near paying my development costs -- I recouped about 20%.

My publisher told me that strategy games are tough to make money on (unless you're Sid Meier, I assume). They published quite a few strategy games. They had a hard time figuring out a good way to market them that actually had a good ROI. At one point, I tried Google AdWords (because targeted advertising would work, wouldn't it?) I didn't make back the money I spent. My publisher had invested a bunch of money (a lot more than I did) promoting their games with Google AdWords, as well, because they wanted to test the targeted-advertising market. They eventually decided that they couldn't get a net-positive ROI from AdWords.

It's just a hard market out there. I suspect the only way to really make it as an indie developer is to make something super innovative and addictive (and get really lucky on top of it).

http://www.ioccc.org/winners.html#H Look at Anthony C Howe (me). 1991 (vi clone in 1526 bytes source, went on to become the floppy disk rescue editor "ae" in early Debian) and 1993 (egrep) are particularly interesting for their data structures. My favourite from someone else is http://www.ioccc.org/ /years.html#1992_buzzard.2 (forth clone); took me ages to understand this this gem way back then. And for those who think I'm bragging, shit ya, since the IOCCC has no real prize, they say bragging rights is all the winners get.

C is not about being cryptic, though it certainly can be when done badly. Its about clever data structures, being methodical, disciplined, where small is beautiful; instead of memory and CPU cycles being cheap.

Another great C example is the early "Empire" http://www.classicempire.com/ before there was fancy graphics and Sid Meyer's Civilisation.

Here I was hoping they had made Empire (old strategy game from DOS days) for the iPad/iPhone

Come on, this is Slashdot, you don't need to explain what Empire is. Speaking of which, there is at least a remake for Windows XP.

Back in 1980 or so, I bought a Heathkit H11 which was a repackaged PDP-11. It had dual 8" floppy drives. I wanted it to implement my Empire game on it, which I did, and distributed a few copies of the binary. When I later got an IBM PC with 5.25" drives, I backed up the Empire source files from the H11 by writing them out to a serial port, and using a program I wrote for the PC that read from the serial port and wrote to a floppy. So far, so good. Eventually, I put all the PDP-11 version of the source code up on my website http://www.classicempire.com./ This year, a person who had a PDP-11 emulator tried to recompile Empire from those sources, and discovered one of the files was missing! Arggh. I had long ago copied all my 5.25 floppies to CD-ROMs, but the file wasn't there, either. I had obviously overlooked backing that one up when transferring the files to the PC. I had thrown out all my paper listings, and just had some handwritten code on notepaper (I use to write code that way, later typing it in). I gave away my H11 in the 80's, but the person I gave it to had thrown it in the trash (too bad, they are valuable collector's items now). But I did have the old 8" floppies. If only I could read them, and if only they were even readable after 27 years. I emailed my old friend from college, Shal Farley, who now runs Cheshire Engineering. He said he had an old 11 in the back room, it had an 8" drive and an ftp server on it, but he hadn't fired it up in years. I sent him the floppies, and wouldn't ya know, it worked perfectly and he imaged the floppies (about 8 of them). Every single byte read without error! I was amazed. He was kind enough to email me the contents, and I added it to the web site. I'm grateful to Shal for rescuing my data! When I backed up my 5.25" floppies to CD about 12 years ago, about 90% copied without errors. The ones before 1985 were nearly all thoroughly unreadable, though, which is why I figured the older 8" ones would be quite useless.

Hate to spoil a perfectly good joke, but Bright did not invent or name C++. Credit for that belongs to Bjarne Stroustrup.

Bright did create some widely used C++ compilers. But to me he will always be the author of that notorious time sink, Empire. If you count derived games like Civilization (which is just Empire with a complicated resource model) Bright has single-handedly destroyed more productivity than Pac Man and Warcraft combined!

And of course a D implementation is available!

Is Empire, Wargame of the Century. You can get the original PDP-10 FORTRAN source code from classicempire.com.

Empire pretty much invented the strategy type computer game back in 1977, and was selected as Computer Gaming World's 1987 game of the year.

http://www.classicempire.com/

Yes, I wrote it :-)

I started playing Empire http://www.classicempire.com/ with my Atari ST about 1987? Move forward to today, and I'm still playing it, albeit a newer version. http://www.killerbeesoftware.com/ Speaking of Atari games ... FTL's Sundog and Dungeon Master

Sid Meyer's Civilization isn't like Avalon Hill's Civilization. But it is a lot like Walter Bright's Empire.

I vote for Empire, any version, by Walter Bright. The original was played on very slow computers and was fun even when you had to wait a couple minutes for the computer to complete its turn. Now the game is much better for two reasons. First, the computer takes its turns almost instantaneously. Second, the game is free for download from Walter Bright's website. See http://www.classicempire.com/

All of them are still pretty playable. Most flash games just last one lunch break.

Empire, Moria, Labrinth and Dry Gulch. I would love to know what became of these games...are they still alive anywhere? That would be awesome to bring some of them back!!

Moria's still around, being maintained by David J. Grabiner... some people still play it on "modern" platforms (or you can telnet to chungkuo and play it there along with many other classic games.)

I'm not familiar with Empire but it seems to have turned into a PC game (now ancient and available at Underdogs and other fine establishments). THis page looks like a good bet, it has download links for PDP-10, PDP-11, VAX/VMS, PC, source etc.

I see the others mentioned historically here but "dry gulch" and "labyrinth" are too commonly used for me to find anything actually useful.

is also the author of "Empire". For those of you old enough to remember, this was a great game. I remember playing on the VAX all weekend during college. It wasn't graphical or real-time, but it was addictive. I keep watching his site hoping someone will port it to the Palm platform, but no one has yet.