Slashdot Mirror
Falcon 4.0 - The Game Which Refuses to Die
jonerik writes "Today's Boston Globe has this article on the worldwide cult following behind Falcon 4.0, a 1998 flight simulator program which was discontinued by its manufacturer (Hasbro Interactive) the following year. Shortly after it was dropped, someone leaked the game's source code and before you could say 'open source' Falcon 4.0 buffs around the world began fixing bugs in the game and adding new features. Enter Claude Cavanaugh, who approached the current owners of Falcon 4.0 (Atari, which is currently owned by a French company formerly known as Infogrames) with the idea of incorporating the hackers' improvements into Falcon 5.0. Although Falcon 5.0 won't be appearing anytime soon due to financing issues, happily Xicat Interactive will be releasing Falcon 4.0 Gold: Operation Infinite Resolve in April, which will include all of the upgrades originally intended for 5.0."
Its nice to see a behemoth friendly to open sourcing commercially dead games, even if this one happened inadvertently and in the worst way.
Now if they'll only consider doing it for some of their other properties (hint hint, "Total Annihilation").
Now, if they'd release the changes with the source code as well, THAT would be a story in itself.
Someone leaks the source code for a product that that the original company can no longer support. OS geeks find and fix the bugs and produce new features, now some other company will be making money by packaging the fixed/patched/upgraded game. And this is good how?
Fire. Spend 30 seconds uncapping powder horn, loading powder, loading musket ball. Remove ramrod, push ball down, lift musket, fire dead on shot at enemy. Musket ball loses accuracy at 40 yards and veers off into the unkown.
Repeat above process maybe 20 times or so, until you run out of powder or musket balls. Spend rest of match attempting to bayonett enemy. Get bayonnetted. Wound is minor but becomes infected. Have limb amputated.
Respawn in next map, get mowed down by cannon because you can't break rank.
Now I can't say I wouldn't play an RTS (or preferrably, a turn-based strategy game) set in the Civil War or Revolutionary War (I know there have been several good ones, but nothing lately that implements nicer 3D graphics and the accompanying terrain systems they afford), but any FPS set pre-WW I will either bite because the designers try to retain some semblance of realism, or be so ludicrously unrealistic that the setting would be pointless. Plus, do we really want to encourage a mad rush for the horses at the beginning of the match ("D00D... that horse was mine!")?
It is the most intricate, complex, massive, and realistic simulation ever released to the gaming public. There is no second place - whatever second place is is a galaxy away. The fact that this game was achieved in 1998 is still mind-boggling. Here we are in 2004, and no simulation has even attempted to do what Falcon does, let alone tried and fell inevitably short.
Unlike Daikatana and (probably) Duke Nukem Forever, Falcon 4.0's endless years in development created a true achievement. The game was flawed - oh, there were bugs, and things to fix, which is where all this open source development is happening - but it's also a major testament to home computing power. It is what gaming should stand up and point to as, "this is what we are capable of". It's awful close to bringing military-use simulations into the home. Almost scarily so, as the game essentially teaches you how to pilot a true blue F-16.