Bethesda Gives Away The Elder Scrolls - Arena

Dan L writes "In celebration of the 10th Anniversary of the classic Elder Scrolls PC RPG series (Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind, yada, yada..), Bethesda has offered up the original DOS version of The Elder Scrolls: Arena for free download. Also, there is a rather cool contest to win some original game art, or some top of the line video cards and sound gear."

Comments

Re:if only..

[0x0d0a]

You know, at one point I was sure that GPLed old games would languish (and that might still be the case, if the dev population is sufficiently thinned out by masses of releases), but games like Marathon, Quake and Doom have certainly not suffered from being GPLed. Quake in particular has been improved in some amazing ways.

Honestly, I'd sooner that they'd opened the source but kept the data files commercial.

Lucasarts enjoyed a bunch of people buying their old games after the ScummVM people implemented ScummVM and made the Lucasarts games run (with new features and goodies) on a modern platform. Lucasarts didn't have to pay a penny.

Re:Free not Free Enough

[oskillator]

Emulators such as DosBox ensure that binary-only games will be runnable forever, on any platform someone cared enough to port the emulator to. Emulators currently won't help much for the games listed in that article, but that's really just a matter of time.

The inability to produce tenebrae-style variants is a shame, though.

Re:Free not Free Enough

[Nasarius]

There are potential legal issues with releasing the source. For example, all the code has to be audited, just in case one idiot programmer copied some code he shouldn't have and Bethesda gets sued. And as long as DosBox remains active, there's no worries about losing ability to play the game.