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."
Forgive me if I'm missing something, but this seems to be exactly what GOG has been doing for years. Are they remaking them?
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
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."
While I agree with the basic sentiment, I have to ask one thing.
Of those hundreds of games society stands to lose forever, how many of those are actually worth remembering? How many of those would society care about if we kept them?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
that is why you should go for GOG first and steam last.
Plus STEAM's DRM has been cracked, you just have to search hard in the darker crevices on the intartubes to find it.
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
GoG is definitely clean and legit.
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 ^_^
That's like saying which books, movies, or songs are worth remembering. Who are you to decide?
While I agree with the basic sentiment, I have to ask one thing.
Of those hundreds of games society stands to lose forever, how many of those are actually worth remembering? How many of those would society care about if we kept them?
Considering how many people go nuts over a few recovered Doctor Who episodes or the IS blowing up a couple old ruins in Palmyra, I'd say a lot of people care. A friend of mine and I still like to retro game from time to time on a C64, I'll admit I would be rather sad if Bubble Bobble was lost forever. Sure, 90% of everything is shit but I think a lot of people would care if we lost some of the classics they played and enjoyed and we managed to just lose them forever. Guess it depends what you mean, the world wouldn't collapse if we lost Mozart or Elvis either but it'd be a poorer place.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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.
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
You can play it for free in your browser.
A remake was attempted in 2012 but the Kickstarter campaign didn't reach its goal.
Look at you, hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?
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
That's what your parents and grandparents said, and what your children and grandchildren will say. And all of you are wrong.
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
You're a construction worker named Thomas, aren't you?
Video games aren't "nascent" at all, they've been around since the 1970s
Well in comparison to other art forms-- e.g. painting, sculpture, writing-- that's nascent. And part of my point here is that we've probably already lost some of that art from the first few decades due to DRM, or just due to the software being locked to specific hardware. I'm possibly a little radical in that I've supported the idea that, if developers want to enjoy legal copyright protection, they should be submitting their source code to some governmental body (Library of Congress?) for preservation. When the copyright expires, the source should be put into public domain.
and were better quality in previous decades too.
I don't know why you're even bringing up this idea. Some people are going to argue with you, but it's completely irrelevant to what I was saying.
Don't worry, man, this has just been a bad year for losing people. Pratchett was probably the worst, but we lost Roddy Piper too, as well as Robert Z'Dar, Gunnar Hansen, Nimoy, B.B. King, Wes Craven and quite a few others. (And yes, I do have a thing for B movies)
You're a construction worker named Thomas, aren't you?
See ya, Jinxo.
I worry that we are producing more things that could potentially be stored digitally at an exponential rate, https://www.domo.com/blog/2015... (data never sleeps 3.0) and at some point, it's all just going to be so much noise. But the way the internet works currently, find a passion, find a dozen people who share the passion, and you can restore or maintain digital data for . . . a while.
Might as well face it I'm addicted to data.
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?
Modern game are mostly always-online client server based games. Once the servers gone the game is gone. Also most of them are shit.
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
Hehehehehe....
Brings back memories!
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Yeah, but some of that data is straight-up garbage. I doubt we're producing books, music, and movies at a rate that outpaces our ability to store them. I'm sure we have plenty of storage to archive all the important works of art that are being created. I'm sure we could archive the source code of every piece of software-- even including all the various versions. I even bet we have plenty to to archive every tweet, blog post, and instagram pic.
If I had to guess, I'd guess the problem would come from trying to archive every phone call, text message, IM, email, and download-- including metadata, including redundant copies of everything transferred. That is, if I send an email to 20 people containing a 50 MB PDF, keeping each copy, 50 MB * 21. If you're trying to store a copy of every movie every time it's streamed from Netflix, that's going to add up really quick.
So the real trick is going to be to make sure we have an archival procedure for the data we care about. We don't need to store everything.
Oh please. Please point out any new bands who actually write and play their own music (and have become very popular), and weren't just some corporate-created entity. The whole nature of mass-marketed music has changed in the last couple of decades. Music basically died with Napster.
Software's been locked to specific hardware for a long time. All the early arcade games used custom hardware; the really early ones didn't even have CPUs, they implemented everything with discrete logic chips. All that stuff has been emulated by the MAME project.
Your idea about submitting source code for copyright protection sounds good though.
Yes, those were the One Directions of their times, but back then they also had Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and lots of other great classic music which people still listen to now. (And before you say any of these weren't popular, IIRC Jimi played at Woodstock in front of a quarter-million people, and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is the best-selling album in history (or was it AC/DC's Back in Black?).)
There is no such music being made today.
Also, don't forget, AutoTune did not exist prior to roughly 20 years ago.
... copyright should expire.
Yes, such music IS being made today. Just because you don't like today's music doesn't mean that nobody will be listening to it twenty or even fifty years from now. They will.
Hendrix, Zep, Floyd? Sure, they're almost universally seen as classics...now. They weren't in their time. In their time people like you were sagely declaring that they were just more of the fad crap for kids that has taken over music these days.
And by that same token, some of today's bands that people like you are dismissing are going to be seen as classics in the future, even though they aren't today.
You have the advantage of having already seen what music from the past has stood the test of time, while ignoring that the reason modern music hasn't stood that test is because by definition, that test is still in progress. The fact that I am not psychic means that I can't say which songs and bands will make that cut, not that none of them will.
As for AutoTune, you're just recycling the same garbage argument that was applied to the synthesiser, the record scratch, and the electric guitar. It's one more tool in the toolbox, not some grim harbinger of the death of creativity.
There is nothing - literally not one single thing - that you're saying (or even CAN say) about modern music that wasn't being said about the music you like back when it was modern.
Your side of this argument is always, and can only ever be, the losing one.
if all popular music from the 00s and 10s disappeared, it'd be no loss at all, whereas the music of the 60s through mid-90s was filled with cultural treasures.
Past a certain age, which is generally around 35, most people lose interest in new music. I'd take a bet that you were born around 1960 and so interest in anything after 1995 faded rapidly.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Wrong! I was born in the mid-70s. I lost interest in everything after 1995 because it was all crap, and I gained an interest in all the stuff from when I was a toddler (or not even born) because it was quality music.
I see the same thing with a lot of 20-somethings (and younger) these days: I see them going to classic rock concerts with their middle-aged parents. When I was a teenager, there was no way in hell any of us would go to a rock concert with our parents; our tastes were just too different. These days, we still have bands from the 70s and 80s touring. When I was a teenager, this just didn't happen; there were no 50s bands still playing to large crowds.
So glad someone else caught it.
Ah! That would be cool. That game was pretty revolutionary.
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
Some people once thought a Dr. Who original episode, once shown, was straight up garbage. Ask a widower if he'd like copies of all old emails, text messages, etc from his spouse. Straight up garbage to you and me, but to him, maybe not. I think we are producing data that is of interest to N people (N >0) at a rate that outpaces our ability to store them. But this does not keep me lying awake at night. So long, as you point out, I have an archival procedure for all the junk I care about.
Might as well face it I'm addicted to data.