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Abandoned Games
Ghost Pig writes "The people of Exiled Gamers have put together an Abandonware Campaign with which they hope to be able to convince game publishers to rescue titles from their current 'Abandonware' status, and make them available for the public to play (legally) once again. They have made mention of quite a few titles that have slipped into the status of Abandonware (titles that it's no longer possible to buy at retail, and that are near impossible to locate on sites such as eBay), which includes System Shock 2, Freespace 2, as well as older titles, such as The Chaos Engine, Alien Breed and Flashback."
Personally I'd rather they left them in the "grey" area or released them as freeware. Quite often I've played a game left for dead, found it to be really worth it and hence became a fan of the company. I'd like to hope others have done this as well and hence we're all found some new games and new intrests.
I tend to pirate games I can't get any other way. If I could buy them then I woukd, but with the current market there just isn't space on the shelves for older games and the retailers would make no money off them so wouldn't even want to stock them.
Leave them where we can get them for free. That way we can check out the history and decide if the latest one would be worth investing in or not.
I like muppets.
A plug for one of my favourite games — Dink Smallwood. Two years after the game was published, it was "On 10-17-1999 released the game as freeware, no ad-ware, no spyware and no strings attached." Now that's an example to follow!
;)
That was one cool and wicked game, and because they included the source of the original game (the map, etc; not the engine, IIRC), I was able to recompile the game so that I started with 500 Strength, 50000 money, etc and have lots of fun
You should check it out, it's the funniest (in a wicked sort of way) RPG I've ever played.
The freespace 2 license said that you were allowed to copy it and give it away to friends, though.
A lot of old games were really nice. The one in that list that really stood out to me was Flashback. I played for ever just to beat it, and it was among the first games I really liked. That along with Another World were really fun games. A few other not noted in the list at the site are the "Space Quest" series (Space Quest 1 was *awesome*! First game where "lick ground" was a valid command!), the "Kings Quest" series, and also the "Quest for Glory" series (Though it's not fun being killed completely randomly by bees.) All fun games, and really entertaining. Comparing them to some games these days will make some say "They really don't do it like they used to". Games these days are a lot more graphics centric.
Well, EA recently renewed the trademarks on System Shock 3.... although they have probably done this just to sit on it (and stop fan made successors?). AFAIK the IP relating to the SS series is owned by different companies (this was in an interview on one of the SS fan sites).
Bioshock the spiritual successor to the SS series, so we'll just have to see how that lives up to expectations when it comes out.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
It looks like more and more "abandoned" games are being ported to mobile devices, the low resolution, low power of which is a good match to the capabilities of the computers they were developed on, that many years ago.
Check this page for example:
http://www.magic-productions.fr/mobile_games.php
Currently, it mostly contains classical Amiga titles, ported to Symbian-compatible phones. I guess in a couple of years it will also contains PC games from the mid-nineties, as mobile devices keep improving.
If I was owning the rights to a famous computer game of yore, I sure would be very cautious, today more than ever, not to miss an opportunity to license it again. Today is a bad day for abandonware.
There is no major money is the ancient games. There is however small money in them.
Selling these games online for a couple of bucks doesn't hurt anyone. It's pretty much 99% profit. They don't need to produce "expensive" cdroms. Support? well.. none, make that very clear when people buy it. Afterall, it's ancient software that often doesn't run well on current systems. In turn the distributers could donate money to projects that offer support for their ancient games. Projects like DOSbox, which is pretty much required for a lot of those older games.
So in short:
- online distribution of the game AS IS
- including optional scanned manuals
- low price
- percentage of the profit to projects that make it possible to run the old game
it's a win-win situation for everybody
This doesn't concern me personally. I have three legit store-bought copies of the game already.
But why oh why oh why did the folks at Vivendi "We put the 'Battle' in Bnetd" Universal decide to pull (well, rather, not re-arrange the redistribution) the Betrayal at Krondor from freeware? It's a wonderful game, one of the greatest RPGs ever made for PC. And there it sits, dusty, once again doomed to be "abandonware". I may sound a bit silly when babbling about the mythical Golden Era when people could download the game, legally and all, from Sierra. But it is a nice game. *sigh*