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."

Leave them "dead"

[Turn-X Alphonse]

Personally I'd rather they left them in the "grey" area or released them as freeware. Quite often I've played a game left for dead, found it to be really worth it and hence became a fan of the company. I'd like to hope others have done this as well and hence we're all found some new games and new intrests.

I tend to pirate games I can't get any other way. If I could buy them then I woukd, but with the current market there just isn't space on the shelves for older games and the retailers would make no money off them so wouldn't even want to stock them.

Leave them where we can get them for free. That way we can check out the history and decide if the latest one would be worth investing in or not.

Dink Smallwood

[shreevatsa]

A plug for one of my favourite games — Dink Smallwood [rtsoft.com]. Two years after the game was published, it was "On 10-17-1999 released the game as freeware, no ad-ware, no spyware and no strings attached." Now that's an example to follow!

That was one cool and wicked game [wikipedia.org], and because they included the source of the original game (the map, etc; not the engine, IIRC), I was able to recompile the game so that I started with 500 Strength, 50000 money, etc and have lots of fun ;)

You should check it out, it's the funniest (in a wicked sort of way) RPG I've ever played.

Re:Consider yourself corrected

[Anonymous Coward]

The freespace 2 license said that you were allowed to copy it and give it away to friends, though.

Old games were pretty nice

[Seta]

A lot of old games were really nice. The one in that list that really stood out to me was Flashback. I played for ever just to beat it, and it was among the first games I really liked. That along with Another World were really fun games. A few other not noted in the list at the site are the "Space Quest" series (Space Quest 1 was *awesome*! First game where "lick ground" was a valid command!), the "Kings Quest" series, and also the "Quest for Glory" series (Though it's not fun being killed completely randomly by bees.) All fun games, and really entertaining. Comparing them to some games these days will make some say "They really don't do it like they used to". Games these days are a lot more graphics centric.

System Shock 3

[T-Kir]

Well, EA recently renewed the trademarks on System Shock 3 [gamershell.com].... although they have probably done this just to sit on it (and stop fan made successors?). AFAIK the IP relating to the SS series is owned by different companies (this was in an interview on one of the SS fan sites).

Bioshock the spiritual successor to the SS series, so we'll just have to see how that lives up to expectations when it comes out.

Games are getting ported to mobile devices

[boa13]

It looks like more and more "abandoned" games are being ported to mobile devices, the low resolution, low power of which is a good match to the capabilities of the computers they were developed on, that many years ago.

Check this page for example:
http://www.magic-productions.fr/mobile_games.php [magic-productions.fr]

Currently, it mostly contains classical Amiga titles, ported to Symbian-compatible phones. I guess in a couple of years it will also contains PC games from the mid-nineties, as mobile devices keep improving.

If I was owning the rights to a famous computer game of yore, I sure would be very cautious, today more than ever, not to miss an opportunity to license it again. Today is a bad day for abandonware.

Re:Dink Smallwood

[TubeSteak]

Maybe all those 'old' games will get a new lease on life when a good part of the several billion people in Asia & India start getting cheap low power computers that can't run 3d intensive games.

Heck, if those companies were smart, they'd be offering NOW to bundle their games with the cheapo $299-$499 computers. I doubt they'd get much money per unit, but that isn't exactly the point.

Activision released Civ-CTP2 this way

[Snarfangel]

And even with a lot of the code and content ripped out of it (like the music) for copyright reasons, and despite not being under the GPL, it still has a fair number of people modding and improving it. If you aren't going to make money on a property anyway, the good will from such a gesture could help your other products.

Redneck Rampage

[TheRealBurKaZoiD]

Personally, I'm looking for a copy of redneck rampage. Yes, it was a stupid game, but I've never laughed so hard at an FPS before in my life.

Online redistribution

[El_Muerte_TDS]

There is no major money is the ancient games. There is however small money in them.
Selling these games online for a couple of bucks doesn't hurt anyone. It's pretty much 99% profit. They don't need to produce "expensive" cdroms. Support? well.. none, make that very clear when people buy it. Afterall, it's ancient software that often doesn't run well on current systems. In turn the distributers could donate money to projects that offer support for their ancient games. Projects like DOSbox, which is pretty much required for a lot of those older games.

So in short:
- online distribution of the game AS IS
- including optional scanned manuals
- low price
- percentage of the profit to projects that make it possible to run the old game

it's a win-win situation for everybody

Bring back Betrayal at Krondor!

[WWWWolf]

This doesn't concern me personally. I have three legit store-bought copies of the game already.

But why oh why oh why did the folks at Vivendi "We put the 'Battle' in Bnetd" Universal decide to pull (well, rather, not re-arrange the redistribution [liberatedgames.com]) the Betrayal at Krondor from freeware? It's a wonderful game, one of the greatest RPGs ever made for PC. And there it sits, dusty, once again doomed to be "abandonware". I may sound a bit silly when babbling about the mythical Golden Era when people could download the game, legally and all, from Sierra. But it is a nice game. *sigh*

I'd kill Abandonware

[rsilvergun]

if I was a publisher (and profits mattered more than games, I know a few for whom they don't). Right now I'm sitting on a stack of 40+ PSX/PS2 games I'm dying to play. There's probably another 10 or 20 'classic' games I want to spend serious time with. Then there's the whole MMORPG thing. And then you've got games like Morrorowind and Oblivion with 300+ hours of gameplay. How the hell is a publisher suppose to sell new games in a market like this? It was fine when the common folk were first getting into games. All those 20-something's buying Final Fantasy VII and Madden 2kX did a fine job driving growth. But pretty soon publishers are going to run smack into the wall that is their own back catalog.

Re:Dink Smallwood

[ErikInterlude]

The irony is if the movie hadn't gone public domain, no one would have ever seen it...

I was under the impression that the reason the copyright had not been renewed was because the film was so universally panned when in theatres that it was considered worthless and forgotten about. The networks grabbed it, aired it to death, and it became the cultural mainstay it is today, as you mentioned.

In any case, I've been told that the screenplay is still copyrighted, so you can present the movie all you want, but you have to replace the actual spoken words and implied plot. Presumably the networks made a deal to get around this once the studios brought it up.

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

[canadian_right]

Sometimes the code is just gone.

I wrote a commercial game back in 1989, and as far as I know the source code is GONE. A backup on floppies survived until the early 1990's, but I sure don't have a copy anymore. Even if I did, I don't own the copyright - the publisher does, and they got bought out by a bigger firm a long time ago (which in turn was itself eaten). The publisher owned all the art and sound copyright also.

Save the Public Domain!

[grumpygrodyguy]

"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."

Woah woah woah, hold the phone.

Abandonware is a godsend for gamers. It allows you to download your old favorites for free if you can spare the 5 minutes to Google for them. Licensing these games back from abandonware status does nothing to help consumers! The public domain is an endangered public right...music , games, movies...even our very childhoods...are being made illegal to re-visit unless we pay a tax to the information slave masters. When you revoke abandonware status you make it illegal to download games for free, and you end up paying $39.99 on amazon for M.U.L.E. or Space Quest.

STOP ADVOCATING THE PILLAGING OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN, WE NEED MORE PUBLIC DOMAIN RIGHTS NOT LESS.

We should see these as humanity heritage

[unity100]

I mean no joke ! Isnt it a fact that generations have grown up playing these titles and these titles have set the way for the game industry, defined its route to be ? Isnt gaming entertainment industry a huge sector in the world right now ? So what do these games lack to be an initiator, a pioneer of major development in technology like sawing machines once did for textile ? Isnt it plain stupidity to let these titles last code be deleted in some old hard drive ?