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Prince of Persia Source Code Released On Github
rbarreira writes "The source code for the original Prince of Persia game has been released on github by its author, Jordan Mechner. This release comes three weeks after Jordan announced the find of a box containing old floppy disks that had been forgotten in the back of a closet for 20+ years. A 'digital archeology' effort was launched to recover the contents of the floppy disks, with the help of Jason Scott from textfiles.com. Some photos from the 'copy party' have also been posted."
You want to say, "AlhumdilAllah," for "Praise the lord." "Insha'Allah" means "If God wills (it)."
Why wouldn't he be able to do so when he's the copyright holder?
As the author and copyright holder of this source code, I personally have no problem with anyone studying it, modifying it, attempting to run it, etc.
And, no, I doubt he'll sue himself.
We did this for fun, not profit. As the author and copyright holder of this source code, I personally have no problem with anyone studying it, modifying it, attempting to run it, etc. Please understand that this does NOT constitute a grant of rights of any kind in Prince of Persia, which is an ongoing Ubisoft game franchise. Ubisoft alone has the right to make and distribute Prince of Persia games.
(+1, Disagree)
Broderbund was just a publisher, at least for the Apple II version. They marketed and sold the game, and paid royalties to Jordan, who retained the rights.
hint
Prince of Persia was a very novel and highly frustrating game. I remember getting all the way on PC just to fail near the end boss. I vividly remember a mirror...
The motion of the player character was so fluid it simply fascinated me back in the day. It did fit onto on floppy.
Now, a couple of sequels later(mostly pompous irrelevant wasteful and shallow money grabbing console games and as I've been told a movie on top of that) the original still stands out. It had a certain elegant charme. And very grizzly deaths. After a while I got sick of being sliced up, spiked, smashed, mauled and grieviously injured to be honest. It was very raphic.
And it did fit onto one floppy. It's nice to see one of the ol masterpieces revealed. Did he include the artwork?
20 minutes into the future
At that time Jordan kept a bunch of journals of the development process, they're all online. He even has video of the motion captures he did of his brother, these were used to animate the Prince and it's really uncanny to see how much of that came through in the game. Warning, if you click the link be prepared to waste a LOT of time reading, it's addictive. http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/1985/10/october-20-1985/
No, publishers don't need rights transferred to them, nor do they need ownership of any sort. All the need is to be granted the rights required to publish and that can be for a limited timeframe and/or number of copies even. This is how copyright was originally envisioned to work. Creators retained their copyright, and granted generally via contract to a second party, if necessary, the right to copy the work. Just take a look at how things worked even as recently as the late 1800s. Authors did a lot of self-publishing.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.