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Commander Keen: Keen Dreams Source Code Released

Posted by Soulskill on from the better-late-than-never dept.

New submitter ildon writes: Recently, the rights holder of former game publisher Softdisk's game library put the rights to some of their old titles up for sale, including Commander Keen: Keen Dreams, one of the few games in the series not to be published by Apogee. A group of fans created an Indiegogo campaign to purchase those rights. We are just now seeing the fruits of that effort with the full source code of the game being published to GitHub. About a year ago, Tom Hall found the sources to episodes 4-6, but it's not clear what, if any, progress has been made on getting Bethesda to allow that code to be released.

2 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Copyright seems weird by BenFranske · · Score: 3, Informative

    IANAL but just to complete a minor lesson in authorship and copyright in the US. By default copyright is assigned to the original author of something...except is the work is done "for hire" in which case the hiring individual or company will own the copyright independent of whomever wrote the work. At any point the owner of a copyright (which is really a set of rights they are allowed) can sell some or all of those rights (or otherwise license the work) on an exclusive or non-exclusive basis. If the copyright is sold wholesale than the new copyright owner would typically change the copyright notices to indicate that. To further complicate things with game franchises such as this there are additional trademark issues and rights issues surrounding the character, spin-off (derivative) works, etc. which may or may not have been included in the sale which is why the binary files (presumably containing the art) may not be licensed under the GPL.

    Bottom line is the IP rights are a messy thing.

  2. Re:and also should be worth mentioning by Sulix · · Score: 5, Informative

    I actually did reverse engineer Keen 5 and put together a playable version for Win/Mac/Linux.
    It was quite a lot of work, though the Commander Keen community had already done a lot of reverse engineering
    and a few people pitched in, so it wasn't nearly as much work as I'd feared.

    The source code for the original games, of course, has been found and (lawyers permitting) will be GPLed, so I've not put much more work into the reimplementation.

    Binaries: http://davidgow.net/keen/omnis...
    Code: https://github.com/sulix/omnis...

    (I've also started work on an updated port of Keen Dream based on the source release, though it isn't working yet: http://davidgow.net/keen/omnis... )