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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?
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=-
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 ^_^
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?
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
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?