Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."
The problem is that we don't know.
Today, we learned how to understand Egyptian hieroglyphs by looking at the Rosetta Stone. I doubt whoever made that stone understood the importance at the time. Jumping ahead to something more modern, a lot of early Doctor Who episodes were lost because they taped over them. The idea of reruns wasn't quite a thing yet, and the people making the show apparently didn't think anyone would be interested in watching them again.
So those are just two examples, but there are many writers and artists and engineers throughout history whose work became important or relevant much later on. Meanwhile, we're basically throwing away all the examples of a nascent art form that combines art and engineering like nothing that came before. The way we're locking games into specific hardware platforms and requiring DRM-- it'd be like if we burned all books 7 years after they're completed, for fear that someone might read them without paying a licensing fee.
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