Tux Racer Makes It To The Arcades

cybermint writes "Tux Racer, the well-known game starring Linux mascot Tux, has made its way into a redemption based arcade machine, which has recently been released by manufacturers ICE. The arcade version, co-developed by Roxor Games, is much more simple than the original PC version. It has two big buttons, one for left, and one for right. As far as I can tell, there is no longer a way to jump or do tricks. Tickets are earned by collecting fish. Looks like lots of fun for the kids - I'm glad to see the developers have finally found a good market for their game."

Comments

"redemption" ==> "tickets"

[hawkstone]

But why would anyone want to play it in the arcade?

Think Skeeball, or those stupid "knock the quarters off the shelves" games -- a simple game where if you do well you are rewarded with tickets. So you're right; it's not a game that would work as well if the whole point was to play the game because there are (no offense to Tux) better games in arcades. Games that reward you with tickets don't have to be extremely complex, and Tux Racer is arguably better than something like skeeball for that reason.

Re:Oh the irony

[Spoing]

I'm not much of a gamer anymore though. If it does happen to be free and I'm just missing a few marbles, please correct me.

I know some of the 'history', if you can call it that. I admit to a specific bias on this, so take it for what it's worth.

When all versions of TuxRacer were open, nearly nobody contributed to it. At the same time, it was the #1 download at SourceForge. Since it was so popular, and he was getting little help, the owner of the code removed the parts that weren't his, and relicenced it so he could sell it.

There were gripes, but mostly from folks who didn't understand what the GPL is and how copyright works. These folks took it as a personal snub, though the GPLed open source branch was not taken away or lessened at all.

The sad thing is that Sunspire Studios commercial offering was bad mouthed by the same people who didn't understand copyright, didn't contribute, and didn't understand the GPL. Personally, I bought 2 copies; one for a niece of mine, and one for myself.

The open source branch still exists and lives on as OpenRacer.

As for the character "Tux", the video game version, is not quite the same as Larry Ewing's Tux. I haven't heard Larry complaining, so it's probably not an issue for him either.