Slashdot Mirror
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.
Abandonware isn't a legal term; it means nothing. Just because the company hasn't done anything with their game doesn't mean they aren't entitled to enforce their copyright. Morally, we could discuss it ad nauseum. Technically, however, it's illegal to distribute such games.
No. It's not legal. It's just a law that isn't enforced much, in that most copyright holders of really old games don't bother chasing up abandonware sites, since it's not exactly a huge revenue loss.
Some do, notably Sierra and Lucasarts, though.
Freespace 2 was a commercial game, produced by the same people as Freespace 1. Several years later the source code to the engine was released.
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.
I'd much rather have the source code to those games, as opposed to having them go on sale again. You know why? Because when the companies who own those games decide to stop selling them (again) you'll have to go right back and beg for them to sell them (again). If they release the source not only will you be able to obtain it whenever you want, but you can port the code to play on modern systems (meaning you don't need the silly hack of emulators or having an old DOS machine sitting about).
Open Source: Ensuring that my kids don't have to listen to Dad tell the same "Oh man, when I was your age I played this great game, but we'd need to find an old binary and a goddamn 60 year old computer to play it..." story over and over again.
Losing information is serious business. Games are quickly becoming part of our shared culture. Think of how much our culture loses by losing those games to time? I can still read ancient Greek and Arabic poetry but I can't play Master's of Orion on my PPC Linux box? I don't know, something seems really fucked up about that.
What if the entire Universe were a chrooted environment with everything symlinked from the host?
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!
Speaking of abandonware, there is also the option of taking the old DOS game and optimize it for current hardware and OS:
h tm
On April 14th 2006, a Windows XP/ME/2000/98 version of Another World, with high-resolution support and more detailed background graphics, was released as a tribute to the original game on the Another World website. The port is shareware; to unlock the full version, a special key must be bought from here for 7 euros.
You can download it from:
http://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/index.
Abandonware is NOT legal to copy around as it's NOT legally public domain.
Something goes into the public domain when:
1) The rights owner explicitly places it there.
2) The rights duration expires.
Unless either of those two happens, it's still Copyrighted and the rights to publish (i.e. make and distribute copies) belongs to the rights holder or their successors in interest.
It's infringement, through and through. What the "abandonware campaign" seeks to do is to get the status changed on those titles or get a publishing permission so that they can be distributed legally under whatever conditions they can manage to get the rights holders to grant distribution rights on.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Another World (aka Out Of This World in the US), a technological predecessor to Flashback and a great, mythical game on its own, lost its abandonware status a few days ago when a High Resolution Collector's Edition was released by its author, Eric Chahi. It is currently being sold online for 7 euros, a demo is available. You can also play the official Gameboy Advance port, if you have an emulator or a flashable game cartridge.
h tm
= us
a nworld.inc
Official Website (still being translated; download links at the bottom of the page)
http://www.anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/index.
Official Website in French (lots of very interesting details about the making of the game)
http://www.anotherworld.fr/
Buying the Game
http://www.magic-productions.fr/aw/index.php?lang
Official Gameboy Advance Port
http://www.foxysofts.com/index.php?l=content/gba/
An Excellent Review (from an excellent site)
http://www.idlethumbs.net/display.php?id=13
An Excellent Interview (from same site)
http://www.idlethumbs.net/display.php?id=44
. . . aren't going to be interested in releasing for free old games that might diminish the desire for the purchase of new games (or in the case of arcade/console classics, repurchase of the same games). The effectively perpetual copyrights of these programs have mostly passed to companies with interest in selling current games--the occasional and lauded freeware release of an old game will continue to be rare as hens' teeth.
This is sort of what happened with my favorite game: Continuum / Subspace.
= Downloads&
:-)
Subspace was one of the first massive multiplayer games for the internet... I played it first in 1995 with a 24k modem... and I continue playing it year after year, still my favorite game.
Virgen Interactive released the game after it gave up on selling it (I guess it was too much ahead of times). The most popular client for it is Continuum.
Download Continuum / Subspace clients at:
http://www.subspacedownloads.com/
http://www.trenchwars.org/Trench/index.php?action
Give it a try & join the hundres of players online!
I hope other abandoned games can find such a future as this Virgen abandoned product.
...what they're trying for. Unless I have an actual friend that has it, I can't legally obtain the data to PLAY it on my Linux machine, as much as I'd like to do so. What they're trying to do is get the license grant ammended so that it's legit under specific circumstances (i.e. You can't make money off of it, you can resell it, etc...) to distribute the game data with the Open Sourced engine or FOR the same.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Even if a publisher would want to release one of these old games, they may not be able to due to contractual obligations or practical considerations.
For instance they may have to pay royalties to the developer or licence fees for a software component or trademark for every copy distributed (even if for free). This is particularly troublesome if the party to pay is now defunct or if the current owner of the rights is unknown or disputed. The original contracts may even be missing.
If there was serious money involved they could perhaps be compelled to sort such issues out, but since that isn't the case, most publishers really don't want to go through all the hassle.
A damn shame for sure, but that's just the way things are.
I'd love to get my hands on Vib Ribbon or Rez.
Then go over here and buy Rez. They've obtained the rights to repress some rare/in-demand games.
This guy's the limit!
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.
Apogee (now going by 3D Realms) have released a bunch of their old game for free: Here
.iso s and a CD-R drive. Take your own disc (or buy one from the desk) put it in, put a few pounds/dollars in, choose your disc and burn away - it could even have a lightscribe drive to put a line-art version of the original disc art onto it. (or it could have a printer to print a sticky label and a copy of the license agreement).
.iso of a disc and a pdf file of the manual (which would be included in the disc image). With the beauty of broadband internet, or just DVD discs to be copied onto the machine, it wouldn't be all that hard to keep updating the catalogue available in the machine.
I'm now going to suggest something that I suggested at least a year ago and is even more feasible now:
CD burning stations in game stores. It need not be bigger than any of those displays which have a working playstation or whatever in them for people to use, so wouldn't take up more sales space than stores as used to giving up with those machines.
It would basically be a computer with a huge wad of storage space filled with game disc
All it needs from the game companies is their consent, the
Easy as pie.
FGD 135
It might have been changed since I bought my copy of Freespace2 oh so many moons ago, but the EULA on the disc I just popped in reads like standard boilerplate....but there is the bit about giving it to "friends" (in bold)
This software product, FreeSpace 2 (the "Software"), is
intended solely for your personal noncommercial home entertainment
use. You may not decompile, reverse engineer, or disassemble the
Software, except as permitted by law. Interplay Productions and
Volition, Inc. retain all rights and title in the Software including
all intellectual property rights embodied therein and derivatives
thereof. You are granted a revocable, nonassignable limited license
to create derivative works of this Software solely for your own
personal noncommercial home entertainment use and may publicly
display such derivative works to the extent specifically
authorized by Interplay in writing. A copy of this authorization, if
any, will be provided on Interplay's World Wide Web site, located at
http://www.interplay.com/ or by contacting the legal department of
Interplay Productions in the US at (949) 553-6655. The Software,
including, without limitation, all code, data structures, characters,
images, sounds, text, screens, game play, derivative works and all
other elements of the Software may not be copied (except as provided
below), resold, rented, leased, distributed (electronically or
otherwise), used on pay-per-play, coin-op or other for-charge basis,
or for any commercial purpose. You may make copies of the Software
for your personal noncommercial home entertainment use and to give to
friends and acquaintances on a no cost noncommercial basis. This
limited right to copy the Software expressly excludes any copying or
distribution of the Software on a commercial basis, including,
without limitation, bundling the product with any other product or
service and any give away of the Software in connection with another
product or service. Any permissions granted herein are provided on a
temporary basis and can be withdrawn by Interplay Productions at any
time. All rights not expressly granted are reserved.
etc. etc.
--- There is a man in a smiling bag.
And even with a lot of the code and content ripped out of it (like the music) for copyright reasons, and despite not being under the GPL, it still has a fair number of people modding and improving it. If you aren't going to make money on a property anyway, the good will from such a gesture could help your other products.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
The only situation where you can truly expect it to be legal is when the company holding the copyrights went belly-up and even then you would need to find out whether anyone bid for the copyrights.
But that describes the core problem, and the reason we have "abandon"ware in the first place...
Consider a game produced by a privately-owned company, consisting of one person with no offspring, no known relatives of any degree, and no outstanding debts... If that person died, no one could "own" the copyright, but the copyright would still exist. You still couldn't legally copy that game.
Now, in the real world, you have much more complicated situations that the one I just described, but leave about the same chance of someone legally reissuing the game. For example, company X went under in the 1985 videogame crash and all its assets (including copyrights) went to dozens of different companies and individuals, many of which might not even realize what they got in the deal. One (or more) of those went under in the 1993 Comic crash, with a similar diasporic outcome. Who "owns" the copyright to a given game produced by company X?
You could try to construct a moral or legal argument involving abandonded property, but a bona fide effort to find out whether the holder of the copyrights really gave up his rights might involve approaching the holder.
Yet we have a curious irony here - With a physical object (a sunken ship, for example), yes, you could call it abandoned/salvage/whatever, and legally take posession of it. With abandonware (or books, or music, or any form of intangible "property"), even though everyone could in practice have a copy of it, the law doesn't allow that, and you commit a crime by copying it even though getting permission to copy it would require nothing short of ubiquitous consent from everyone on the planet.
When dealing with older games with a well-defined still existant owner, we get into an ethical (if not legal) grey area. But for games that would take thousands of hours of research just to come up with a pool of probable owners who never even heard of the game in question? That needs to change. Nothing "sketchy" or "contrived" about it!
Personally, I'm looking for a copy of redneck rampage. Yes, it was a stupid game, but I've never laughed so hard at an FPS before in my life.
I think one of the best examples of this was surprisingly enough by Microsoft Research. After abandoning Allegiance (a game truly ahead of its time), the game was continually run by the community, with them modding the game. Years after the fact, Microsoft Research thought the community's efforts were so great, they finally decided to release the source code for the game. What Allegiance is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegiance_(computer_ game)
Where the community is/get the game: http://www.freeallegiance.org/
Definitely a fun game if you can get by the learning curve. One of the best team-work based games I've played. When you have 20+ pilots scramble to a single sector for base defense against an equally large enemy bombing convoy, it is a thing of beauty. (yes, the game theoretically supports 100 vs. 100; though the last time that happened was only in beta testing in 1999)
I was under the understanding that Volition had released the source code for Freespace 2 *and* officially classed the original game CDs as abandonware already.
The ISO images (capable of being put through Alcohol 120% or so) are VERY readily available online with what looks like a real blessing. The FSOpen project is one of those better game-source-code efforts where some real, even impressive improvement was done to the game engine to bring it up to scratch..
Access it via the IP address. They're undergoing domain name negotiations.
"MY APOCALYPTIC TENOR HAS NOT BEEN DISPELLED!" - T-Rex, qwantz.com
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*
if I was a publisher (and profits mattered more than games, I know a few for whom they don't). Right now I'm sitting on a stack of 40+ PSX/PS2 games I'm dying to play. There's probably another 10 or 20 'classic' games I want to spend serious time with. Then there's the whole MMORPG thing. And then you've got games like Morrorowind and Oblivion with 300+ hours of gameplay. How the hell is a publisher suppose to sell new games in a market like this? It was fine when the common folk were first getting into games. All those 20-something's buying Final Fantasy VII and Madden 2kX did a fine job driving growth. But pretty soon publishers are going to run smack into the wall that is their own back catalog.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"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."
Woah woah woah, hold the phone.
Abandonware is a godsend for gamers. It allows you to download your old favorites for free if you can spare the 5 minutes to Google for them. Licensing these games back from abandonware status does nothing to help consumers! The public domain is an endangered public right...music , games, movies...even our very childhoods...are being made illegal to re-visit unless we pay a tax to the information slave masters. When you revoke abandonware status you make it illegal to download games for free, and you end up paying $39.99 on amazon for M.U.L.E. or Space Quest.
STOP ADVOCATING THE PILLAGING OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN, WE NEED MORE PUBLIC DOMAIN RIGHTS NOT LESS.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
My rule is: If the software is EOL then you may copy.
While that is an interesting rule, it still is not the law.
fuck you.
I think there's a good case for automatically expiring copyrights and trademarks if they're abandoned. For example, if software is no longer supported and sold, it should become open source unless it can be shown that it makes up a substantial part of a newer version which is being actively developed. If music or movies not published for say five years, they should lose copyright protection. If the owner of a patent does not create or license a product embodying the invention for five years, it should expire. Ok, so this is simplistic, but the spirit I am trying to get at is to stop hoarding of intellectual property and denying the public at large the chance to enjoy it.
I mean no joke ! Isnt it a fact that generations have grown up playing these titles and these titles have set the way for the game industry, defined its route to be ? Isnt gaming entertainment industry a huge sector in the world right now ? So what do these games lack to be an initiator, a pioneer of major development in technology like sawing machines once did for textile ? Isnt it plain stupidity to let these titles last code be deleted in some old hard drive ?
Read radical news here
Which roughly translates to "water that you are not going to drink of, let it flow". It seems like game companies (not game developers, though as it would seem by the article) don't get that they're not going to get any money on these games, and insist on suing the pants off anybody who tries to relive the old days by downloading an old adventure game off bittorrent. Some people are saying, "Well, they could be ported to mobile platforms and sold for money!". This sounds like a great idea, if I do say so myself. Heck, I would buy them if some old games got ported to the PSP/DS or cellphone. The problem is, they're not doing it! And even if they were, what if I didn't happen to own the platform which the companies choose to port it to? Would it really hurt their revenue if some people were playing it for free on PCS while some were paying to play it on the DS? No, it probably wouldn't. Because the people who would play these old games on new portable platforms wouldn't be playing at home. They would buy it because it's PORTABLE, first, and it's NOSTALGIC second.
The bottom Line? why are you game companies hoarding water (old games) and not drinking it (selling it)? It's not doing ANYBODY any good, and releasing it as abandonware would improve your image.
Consequently, I've already paid for the rights to play a lot of games already where the floppy disks or tapes they were supplied on have long since deteriorated and have been binned.
So those who are anti-Abandonware should bear this point in mind...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.