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How One Company Is Bringing Old Video Games Back From the Dead (fastcompany.com)
harrymcc writes: Night Dive Studios is successfully reviving old video games — not the highest-profile best-sellers of the past, but cult classics such as System Shock 2, The 7th Guest, Strife, and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. It's a job that involves an enormous amount of detective work to track down rights holders as well as the expected technical challenges. Over at Fast Company, Jared Newman tells the story of how the company stumbled upon its thriving business. "Kick didn’t have money on hand to buy the rights, so he scraped together contract work with independent developers and funneled the proceeds into the project. ... Some efforts fall apart even without the involvement of media conglomerates. In early 2014, Kick tried to revive Dark Seed, a point-and-click adventure game that featured artwork by H.R. Giger. But after Giger’s sudden death, demands from the artist’s estate escalated, and the negotiations derailed. ... But for every one of those failures, there’s a case where a developer or publisher is thrilled to have a creation back on store shelves."
Forgive me if I'm missing something, but this seems to be exactly what GOG has been doing for years. Are they remaking them?
Not that old, I guess. What happened to Portal? The original Portal, the Activison interactive novel. I never did find out what happened to the human race.
Dark Seed was notorious for being crap... Like many games of the era, it tried to cash in on the moral panic of the day (violent video games) but lacked anything much beyond a little bit of shock value.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
H R Giger died?! How did I miss that?!
(Checks calendar)
Oh, I was on holiday. Yeah, that figures. Every time I go on holiday, something bad happens.
Last time I went away, Terry Pratchett died and Jeremy Clarkson punched his producer.
I've brought back tens of thousands of old games on my Raspberry Pi. For free.
Modern games are DRM'd to hell. Nevertheless most of them aren't actually copy protected by strong encryption. That is the only reason most of them will still be around in 30 years. Some games are too old to sell but too young to even be in a state of quasi-public-domain. Steam DRM is adding volumes to that list. With most games now sold as DRM'd downloads the future of this data is very much in doubt.
If Steam is sold who will still have the unencrypted programs and game assets? Who will bother to re-assemble games from loose files? Society could lose hundreds of games forever. If I were king I would insist that copies of all source code be kept in an archive somewhere, to be released when the copyright term expires.I think bitrot is one of the most evil forces on the internet. Are there any more practical ways to stop it?
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
It's really System Shock (1) that needs the remake. Even with the mouselook patch, the controls are archaic and clumsy. It doesn't live up to the standards that modern FPS games strive to.
In fact, I can sum up all of those old first person shooters of 15+ years ago in three simple words:
"My Fingers Hurt."
there was a system shock 1?
...I want "3D Ultra Pinball: Creep Night" to run on my 64 bit windows install. And I don't want to download some thunking layer from a random site of uncertain reputation. I want it clean and legit.
Give me that, and I will give you money.
Modern gamers game using apps.
Some older games are better at not creating as much video distraction and tension in the player and can be a good way to ease stress for some people. I remember my father at 76 years old getting a kick out of playing Pac Man on an old console for the first time in the late 1990s. He had late stage prostate cancer and was on heavy morphine for the pain. He was not capable of playing bridge or chess with us any longer. But sitting there with him with an old console I found in a second hand store he had a blast!
The current popularity of simple games on cell phones and tablets like angry birds and the like are just one exception that proves my point. High resolution complicated games that require huge computing resources are for kids and game geeks not the general public who do not take today's expensive video games seriously.
This message was not sent from an iPhone because Peter Sellers really was a deviated prevert without a dime for the call
One that few will likely remember is Amber: Journeys Beyond. Loved that one. It was a Myst-like point-and-click adventure with a ghost/horror theme. That one came out back in the Windows 95 days and won't even run on Windows 98, if I remember correctly! It had something to do with the media player native to Windows 95. I fought to get that game working in the XP years and ultimately had to install Windows 95 using VMWare to get it to play. Ugh! This game definitely needs some conversion treatment. It has been long enough, that I have forgotten enough to enjoy it again, I'm sure. :-)
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
It's a nightmare. I have a piece of music I want to put on my next album. It contains speech from an old BBC programme (1982), so to release it I need to get in touch with the copyright holder. But who actually is that?
The BBC told me to try Getty, because they'd sold off a lot of things to Getty. Getty told me they didn't know, and to contact the original narrator and the scriptwriter for that narrator. I have no idea who the scriptwriter was and, whilst I imagine I could find the narrator I doubt he'd know either. Result? This piece of music will never be released, simply because I cannot find who to ask (and those I did ask do not seem sure of their answers). That's exactly analogous to the problem they're describing in the article - actually finding who to ask, let alone getting a co-ordinated yes/no decision, is just much harder than people might imagine it to be.
As a former avid City of Heroes player, I wish that someone would do this for shuttered MMORPGs. There are so many, and unlike single-player games that will at least run on old hardware and/or OSes, shuttered MMORPGs are completely inaccessible by any means. (Well, other than server emulators, for the very, VERY few that are lucky enough to have them.)
A while back, I wrote an email to GoG basically telling them that I wish they'd consider approaching some of the publishers of shuttered MMORPGs and offering to host them, either buying the rights to the games outright or licensing them, and charging $10 or $15 per month for access to everything (or offer cheaper plans for limited access to one or some games). Because the playerbase of many of these games would be a lot smaller than the new flashy hotness MMORPGs, it probably wouldn't take that much in the way of hardware, and if they could negotiate access to the source code, they might even be able to rewrite parts of the game to run more efficiently or even release updates. I got back a response that boiled down to, "Thanks, but we're not going to do that."
I still think it's a market that's ripe, and someone at some point will exploit that and make a killing off of it.
Hmm... Anyone got some negotiating skills that could pair with my technical skills to get this done?
Just do it.
You'l either find out eventually who the rights holder is, or you get to use it for free. You win either way.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
FarSight sucks next to the free / open source system that does the same thing + has all the home rom's (that are dumped) + hacked rom's (that are dumped) + most of older ver's and some beta roms as well. (based on what is dumped)
Also there emulator system sucks. They are the same people that made action 52 genesis
In early 2014, Kick tried to revive Dark Seed, a point-and-click adventure game that featured artwork by H.R. Giger. But after Giger’s sudden death, demands from the artist’s estate escalated...
[sarcasm]Clearly it is far more important to compensate artists after they have died. That really stimulates their creativity and productivity.[/sarcasm]
On the other hand, in Giger's case, maybe post-mortem artistic output is possible. Still, I expect to see him publishing his works-from-beyond-the-grave.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
I got a copy of B&W as a gift after hearing about it (at the time) a while back. It was never possible to play it due to its copy protection: it's a Windows-only game (at least this copy is), won't run on anything past win98, and actively detects running in a VM and refuses to run (it says it's running in a debugger and so it stops). At the time, I had win2k so I was just SOL from the start. :(
It's frustrating when game makers intentionally make their games unplayable in the future. Sure, library choice locks you to whatever that library requires, but for instance feauiring EXACTLY DIRECTX 4.0.9837.26484 is the kind of shit that breaks the game world for the future. It would be really nice if I could emulate the "home" environment for a game in order to play it a few years after release without pulling a computer out of a landfill to play it.
Want to play Ultima7 (killer game) on today's hardware? No problem... drop it into a dosbox and tell dosbox to throttle the cpu and all is well. Or better yet, run Exult which is a modern engine for all the old collateral from the original game. Origin makes garbage today, it their old stuff is great.
Shy gypsy, slyly spryly tryst by my crypt.
Crazy that I can remember it some 22 years later.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
That'd be fine if infringers were liable only for actual damages. But as long as statutory damages are available to a copyright owner, the orphan works problem will continue. Or are you thinking of another "Nike model" of some benefactor being willing to pay the statutory damages the way Nike reimbursed Michael Jordan for paying fines to the NBA for wearing out-of-spec sneakers?
But as long as statutory damages are available to a copyright owner
I think coming to a copyright holder with a positive attitude of "I was trying to reach out to pay for rights but I couldn't find you, lets work it out instead of paying a bunch of lawyers" would get you what you wanted (license to use the work) to start with. If you have the game distributed under it's own company that can just declare bankruptcy if things turn sour. As long as you pay attention to the legal structure up-front there is no downside.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"Night Dive Studios is successfully profiteering off of old video games they had zero involvement in" would be a better description, I'd say.
Night Dive is notorious for taking community made patches and fixes, then demanding said communities cease distribution - all under the guise of "reviving" a game that'd never died to begin with (but would have, had it not been for these communities in the first place!).
I would dearly love to write a port of Herzog Zwei for modern computers and mobile devices, including the original retro graphics and with actual cross-platform multiplayer, but the rights holders aren't interested at all. :(
... copyright should expire.