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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.
The link to the actual timeline is here:
http://www.linuxgames.com/articles/lokitimeline/
liB
And thanks a lot for your amazing work. I hope you'll be back in some years, when people will have understood that Linux != free beer.
{{.sig}}
If only every company that tanked (no offense to the good folks at Loki, I loved your work and am sorry to see you go) kept a record of what went on during the birth, life, and death of the company. What a resource for budding entrepreneurs that would be- especially if the timeline was cross-refernced with earnings, stock price, etc.
I'm sure much of this information can be found out there via old shareholder's reports, etc, but compiling and centralizing it is a great idea.
Some men spend their entire lives trying to kill themselves for having been born. --Ross MacDonald
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?
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
*This just in*: Every link crashes Netscape 4.61 on RedHat 6.2.
It seems to me that Loki had the same business model as a lot of dot-coms, namely "Hey! Look! We can do this!", rather than "Hey! Look! We can do this and make a lot of money doing it."
I notice a lot of entries in the timeline that state, "Loki released xxx for LinuxPPC." Did Loki do any market research determining that LinuxPPC was a large market that could support them? I doubt it. Look, if Linux is 0.24% of the desktop market share (and it was probably less in 1998-1999), how much of that is LinuxPPC? 0.1% of 0.24%? How many of that handful of people are willing to buy games for $50 each?
Did Loki do any cost/benefit analysis? Probably not, because it was 1999 and hey, there were certainly dumber ideas than porting games. But the fact remains that Loki's business model wasn't sound, and that they could have possibly prevented bankruptcy had they done some simple market research (even a poll asking people which games they would most like to see on Linux.) The fact that they didn't do that says to me that they were more interested in proving they could do something than they were interested in making money by doing something. That's not a strategy with which to start a company, and Loki just found that out the hard way.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
...but they alienated their retailers.
I was involved with a videogame website (handeye.com - don't worry, not a plug... the company's gone...) in spring 1999 that was launching a major advertising campaign centering around the release of Loki's Linux port of Civilization: CTP. What this "timeline" fails to mention is the CONSTANT, REPEATED, and UNEXPLAINED delays for Civ:CTP's shipment. We lost a lot of customers because of pre-orders and repeated emails by us that we had to delay shipment because of "distributor's delays."
Loki was a fine experiment, but Linux games wasn't the problem. Some blame has to be left with management. It can't be good when a company's first release is delayed half a dozen times...
Wow, reading that was more thrilling than riding a rollercoaster, or spending a day with Batman.
wasn't the last article on Loki "The last word on Loki"?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I invite you to get acquainted with an ex-Loki employee named 'Icculus' located at icculus.org. Among his famous Loki work is a port of Serious Sam, a port of the Build engine of 3dRealms/Duke Nukem/Shadow Warrior/... Not to mention hosting of former Loki technologies all for free.
We love our platform. Commercial support or not, we will make happen what we want to happen... Even if that means playing games.
If I learned anything in second grade, it's that a timeline consists of a long line, with two dates at either end, and has other lines splintering off it with pictures and labels and stories.
It seems like any old joe thinks he can throw together a list of events and call it a timeline. Sheesh, they must've been eating paste that day.
-Erik
If you have a game that uses the same source for Windows and Macintosh, and you port it to Linux APIs, then the Mac port means it's already endian-agnostic, and so the LinuxPPC port is basically a matter of "copy source to LinuxPPC machine, run make". How much effort is being wasted there?
The joke is that "The Mayo Clinic" is named after someone named "Mayo", not someone named "Clinic".
Ha ha.
Liberal (adj.): Free from bigotry; open to progress; tolerant of others.
but in this case it's true. I haven't bought a single Linux game. If I buy a Windows game, and it sucks, I can sell it. Also, I have the choice from which local dealership to buy it, so the price will be lower due to the competition.
I as a user expect vendors to make the Linux binaries available as a free download, just like they make patches and bonus map packs available for free download. I will always prefer games which I know have a Linux version.
So, Loki's business model of trying to sell Linux ports was flawed. Most gamers will want the Windows version, if only because using it eliminates a whole class of problems: interoperability problems with the Windows version your friends are using.
It is far easier to critcize what someone else is doing than to do it better oneself. I know that I could not have accomplished what Scott accomplished: the existence on Linux of games which I thought I would always have to boot in to Windows to play.
Scott Draker and Loki entertainment have made my life just a little bit better. I have only one computer right now; an older (circa 1999) ThinkPad which only runs Linux (the hard disk is too small to fit more than one OS), which I use for open-source development.
A good friend of mine and myself both enjoy playing Heroes of Might & Magic III together. Because of Scott Draker putting his neck on the line and making Loki games a reality, we are able to play this game together wherever I can put down my laptop (The game has a "hotseat" mode which allows multiple people to play the game on the same computer).
For this alone, I am glad that Scott had the courage to make a dream a reality.
I am saddened that it had to end so soon. I hope that, when the economy picks up again, we can make the dream a reality again.
There is one thing which I am certain of: Linux will survive these hard times that we are in right now. Its open source nature means that it can survive in a time which has killed BeOS. I will continue my own open-source development; it is only proprietary software that suffers in these tough times.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
Tribes 2 was announced long before the Windows version was out. There was a slight delay shipping it, but if you bought the Windows version instead of the Linux one, it's your own fault.
The real people who should be complaining about Tribes 2 are those that had to spend an extra $100 on a video card to make it even run.
I'm not privy to information regarding the financial situation surrounding Unreal Tournament, but I believe Loki was paid by Epic for their involvement with the game. The real loss for Loki on UT was the time of support staff spent helping people get a charity product running.
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.
-- Mike wildcard@illuminatus.org
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?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
What happens to their DNS entries when the close up shop? Loki owns a domain name, that, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with their business.
I'd like to buy it. (Not lokigames.com - another more obscure one) How do I go about doing this?
--
#include <malloc.h>
free(your.mind);
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.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
There are many open-source game projects, such as FreeCiv, OpenTux (not sure about this; the OSS fork of TuxRacer), and Crystal Space, just to mention a few larger ones. I'm sure every Linux game project could use help, but as a /. article on FreeCiv mentioned recently, they really need help on the art (and other content). You don't need to port commercial games; if we (the Linux community) can produce good games that are free, that could be a selling point for home users. Linuz already has a number of small games that are very well done (such as LBreakout and Penguin Command), but larger games could help to attract people.
I am currently working on a cross-platform game (currently closed, but the future is still undecided) with the goal of making a high-quality space sim. (If you want to see it, we have a small site).
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
Loki was payed by Epic for maintenance and support.
True, but then the next problem arises: the Windows version of Tribes 2 was sold everywhere for a reasonable price, the linux version was much harder to find and usually with a hefty price tag.
No computer game is sold for a "reasonable price" ever. Warez drive up game prices, then more people warez so as not to pay such unreasonable prices. Such is the PC gaming spiral of death. Lots of people point out the price differential between Windows games and Linux games, and I'm sure it was a valid reason for many people to not buy from Loki, but every birth comes labor pains. The birth of commercial Linux gaming is no exception.
Continued patching is indeed an annoyance of simultaneous Windows and Linux development. Luckily, Dynamix had some excellent coders. In most cases, the lag you noticed was due more to communication between companies than it was to converting the patch. Loki's understaffing later in its life cycle certainly contributed some also, considering they were working on Kohan, Postal, FAKK2, Deus Ex, and various patches with a programming staff that hovered between two and three persons.
Nah, UGO's desperate for ad revenue- and UGO's their host.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
No, it means that it really doesn't care which platform it runs on. There's no single "true" OS for it.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Whilst it's extremely annoying and frustrating this is hardly a new thing in the games industry and certainly not unique to Loki.