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Commander Keen: Keen Dreams Source Code Released
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to some of their old titles up for sale, including Commander Keen: Keen Dreams, one of the few games in the series not to be published by Apogee.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.
There's a reason for that. Many years ago I tried to obtain the source code to Cmdr Keen 1-3, somewhat after their heyday (if there was such a thing). Both Carmack and Romero told me that the source code was lost during an office move - see the link to Tom Hall's post - but even if they did find it, it would be easier to code a compatible game engine from scratch in a clean(er) modern language. It might be nice to have for nostalgic reasons, but it would serve no practical purpose.
I wonder if you could negotiate the rights to produce a commented disassembly of the binary and then release that under a free software license.
A complete copyright notice states the owner of copyright in a work. If Mr. Chavez purchased the copyright from Softdisk, as "to purchase those rights" in the summary implies, then he owns the copyright.
These games should have been released for android/IOS years ago.. they would have made a buttload of money off of that old IP.
If they are just going to sit on it they need to release it and let people that are not lazy make it come back to life.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
He is the person who bought the copyright from the company that got it from Softdisk. He still has the right to produce non-GPL works from the source and the right to sell copies of the game that include the game assets, much the way Zenimax still has the right to do the same for Doom, Quake, Quake 2, etc.
An article about something that nobody gives a shit about
Son, you're too young to understand.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
It is weird, looking back from a time when they're so closely associated with another kind of game.
There are other good examples - such as The Lost Vikings, made by none other than Blizzard. And before Epic became all about shooters and engines they made Jazz Jackrabbit, Tyrian, One Must Fall 2097 and Epic Pinball.
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.
Then why do you see the source code release of a classic game to be unimportant?
I would have been mighty pissed if they had picked the poor demons for w3d. but starting out with nazis made the transition pallable.
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... )