Slashdot Mirror
Ultima Revived
Sierpinski writes: "Wired.com has an article about a group of people who are trying to bring back some of the classic (older) games. I don't know what a lot of you gamers are into now... personally I'm into Max Payne and the like, but I still remember those old favorites. Thought some of you slashdotters would like to know." We've mentioned one of these games already, but I see The Bard's Tale is coming back from the dead too.
"EA owns the rights to Ultima and all of its characters, and in this case, no permission was requested or granted," said Jeff Brown, an Electronic Arts spokesman. "As for Richard Garriott's approval, that's like getting permission from Toto to remake The Wizard of Oz."
Richard Garriott was a minor character with no lines in Ultima? I think that L. Frank Baum (were he still alive) might be a better example. It would still not be legal, since MGM owns the movie rights, but comparing Garriott to Toto is bizarre...
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Do ya feel happy-go-lucky, punk?
"EA owns the rights to Ultima and all of its characters, and in this case, no permission was requested or granted," said Jeff Brown, an Electronic Arts spokesman. "As for Richard Garriott's approval, that's like getting permission from Toto to remake The Wizard of Oz."
Nice quote. What's the deal with publishers these days being hostile to everyone including developers? Look at Bioware and Interplay.
First of all, before the inspiration leaves me, someone ought to make a 3-D version of Archon. Heck, if you wanted to really jazz it up, you could go to a semi-FPS mode (like Max Payne) when your pieces were fighting -- you could use terrain to hide from the opposition and even out some of those mismatches. Plus, it would be great to see your wizard missing a basilisk with a fireball and accidentally torching a tree... Of course, it's another Electronic Arts game, so I can imagine the enthusiastic support the project would get.
That temporary fantasy aside, though, I'm not sure how much I support remaking classic games. I will always remember playing Archon against my sister on the PCjr for hours -- she got the joystick, and I got the keyboard, in an attempt to level the playing field -- with the crappy chirpy sound and the ugly CGA graphics. That was the game, and it was great despite all of that. The same goes for Bard's Tale, Lode Runner, Thexder, King's Quest, and all the other games that I remember from my youth -- the games are fixed in a personal and technological context that I can't remove.
Classic games, like classic movies, books, music, or any other kind of art, have both a timeless relevance and a historical context. The former explains why they have earned the appellation of "classic" -- they continue to find an audience. However, the latter is just as important, and it's inseparable from the other half. Can you imagine someone trying to rewrite The Catcher In The Rye because the language is dated, and Holden Caulfield doesn't sound like the kids these days? Or remaking Romeo and Juliet with guns and rock music? (Oops -- too late on that last one.)
I would like my kids (someday, when I have kids) to play the games that I played as a kid, both because they were fun, and also to get a sense of history. I don't want them thinking that technology started at a 1.4 GHz Athlon and went up from there -- I wish I could start them off with a TRS-80 Model I. I think that emulation projects are wonderful work, and wish that game publishers would legitimize abandonware and old ROM sets for the standup arcade games. But remakes, as impressive as they may be, will always leave me a little cold.
"she says i'm lousy conversation. as if that's supposed to help."
Fortunately, since the copyright laws hadn't been extended to ridiculous lengths, you don't need Toto's, or anyone's, permission to distribute or rewrite L. F. Baum's Oz stories, as they started going into the public domain in the 1950's.
... is that they either did something nobody else was doing at the time, or they did it better than everybody else. In other words, they were damn cool when they were current. The problem is, playing modernized versions of classic games often is about the same as hanging around your old high school at the age of 30 - you know you had good times there 14 years ago, but you can't for the life of you figure out WTF is going on now.
Every now and then a remake of a classic (be it a game, movie or TV show) does the legacy justice, but far too often the remake fails miserably because modernization destroys everything that made it a classic. Anybody remember Return to Zork? They decided to update the venerable series by making a graphical adventure that was fun for the 5 minutes it took to realize that whatever it said on the box, this most certainly was not Zork.
I'm not saying these projects are doomed to failure, I'm just saying that anybody modernizing a classic needs to be very careful about evaluating new features in the context of the original game. If the original had an isometric view, for God's sake don't remake it into a first person viewpoint just to demonstrate that you too can license a 3D engine. Keep the remakes true to the spirit of the original, and maybe we'll see something of note come of it.