Abandoned Games

Ghost Pig writes "The people of Exiled Gamers have put together an Abandonware Campaign with which they hope to be able to convince game publishers to rescue titles from their current 'Abandonware' status, and make them available for the public to play (legally) once again. They have made mention of quite a few titles that have slipped into the status of Abandonware (titles that it's no longer possible to buy at retail, and that are near impossible to locate on sites such as eBay), which includes System Shock 2, Freespace 2, as well as older titles, such as The Chaos Engine, Alien Breed and Flashback."

Re:That's an okay idea, but...

[goofyheadedpunk]

What if 60 years from now you have the source code but you don't have a compiler for the now defunct C language? :D

When you said that I was suddenly reminded of a scene from Star Trek: First Contact. It occurred on Earth, shortly before Zefram Cochrane went on his first warp flight. Geordi La Forge, excited about meeting his idol and seeing the first warp ship is gushing. While looking at parts of the ship he's saying things like "Wow, I haven't seen something like this since high school!" To which Cochrane replies, "Wait, High School?" "Yes, in the future we learn about warp drives in high school. In fact, I went to Zefram Cochrane High School."

Then I thought about the increasing abstraction of my field (which happens to be computer science) through time ( For example, I could write a simple chess AI in a couple of days that would have been a major research effort maybe forty years ago. ) and came up with this: A group of GNU hackers from the early 22nd century, in a freak compiling accident, are transported through time to the late 80s. While there they meet a desperate RMS (revered as a god in the early 22nd century) who happens to be furiously hacking after losing all his source to a platter crash, freak tape backup fire, and an inappropriately emptied trash can accident which took all his notes on the compiler to a trash heap grave. The compiler hacker, BLT, has been left behind to assist RMS whilst the other hackers go off to rescue un-free code long lost to the ages. "Oh no, what am I going to do, future GNU/Disciple? I've got a talk in three weeks about my fancy new compiler, but all I've got now is a few source files that bootstrap themselves to say 'Hello, oppressed people of proprietary systems!'" "Don't worry RMS, I can code a C compiler in about 20 minutes. I did it in junior high" "Wait, junior high?" "Yeah, well, in the future a C compiler is usually a required project in the opening week of computer science classes. Pretty much anyone can do it, to various degrees of success; sort of like most people can do algebra now. In fact, I went to Richard M. Stallman high school. There was a statue of you out front. The shadow of you beard shielded by lily white skin from the evil day star at lunch."

Re:Leave them "dead"

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow dude, I'm no starger to reading the heavy lifting people do to rationalize their own behavior, but I think you take this month's prize hands down.