A Loki Timeline

Al "Alkini" Koskelin writes: "Matt Matthews, with the help of the LinuxGames staff and some ex-employees of Loki, has put together a Loki timeline. The timeline is an attempt to document every major event in Loki's past, starting with the announcement of SDL and the Launch of the Loki Website through today, when Loki is officially ceasing operations." They're also looking for more information to make the timeline more complete.

Comments

You know...

[Your_Mom]

Would there actually be any intrest for a volunteer group of programmers to port games? I.E. A group of people doing what Loki was doing but in non-profit status?

I am picturing this: A group of coders being allowed by companies to port their code over to Linux. Companies takes a X% cut, programmers get paid so they can keep doing this, extra gets donated to FSF etc.

Does this sound insane?

What happens to Loki's Open Source Projects?

[wildcard023]

So now that Loki's gone, what will happen to their open source projects? How about the domains that host their projects? Who will get the copyrights?

Prehaps they should take a look at assigning the copyrights to the FSF or other holding organization if this is possible with their creditor situation. What other ogranizations are there that we can trust to hold copyrights? It would be hard to assign a copyright to the FSF and keep the project under a BSD license for example.

I don't know about you, but I love the SDL and openAL. Lots of work has gone into these tools and it would be a shame to see them fall apart because the company supporting them went away.

Does anyone have any past examples of projects/copyrights that were assets of companies that went under? What happened to these?

IANAL - I don't even play one on slashdot.

--
Mike
bash: fortune: command not found, stupid.

Deus Ex?

[Sloppy]

What's the story with Deus Ex? The article says it was nearly done at the end of 2000. Why didn't it get sold?

What really happened with Alpha Centauri?

[Simon Brooke]

One of the things which clearly didn't help Loki was the Alpha Centauri launch problem, and even now I'd really like to know what happened. The Beta was out in May 2000, and it was full-featured, stable and good. On the 28th June 2000 they announced it was ready for duplication, and I ordered my copy from Amazon. In December 2000 Amazon cancelled the order saying they couldn't get it. In April 2001 it finally came out, and I bought my copy... and it's still far and away the game I play most often.

But for nine months - nine months - poor Sam Lantinga was hanging out on the Loki newsgroups explaining that there was a problem about the artwork for the packaging.... and when the game eventually arrived, it came without the collateral that the PC version had, just a bare CD in a DVD-style wallet.

So what really happened? Were Firaxis messing Loki around? Were Electronic Arts messing Loki around? Had Loki just not got the cash flow to print the boxes? (I can't believe this - there must have been enough pre-orders. There was a lot of interest). Judging by the quality of the beta and the demo, I see no reason at all to believe that the game was not finished in June 2000.

Well, that's it, I suppose. Masses of Respect to Scott and to Sam and to all the troops. It was a brave effort; I'm really sorry it didn't fly.