Atari made the orginal Marble Madness, I think Rare ported it over to NES.

I suspect the Marble Madness engine was either reused (very uncommon back in those days), or experience from it was reused in the Snake Rattle n Roll game later on.

If it's even meant to backfire, if there was a group I wanted to discredit I would spread a virus in the name of said group instead of the group I take part.

I don't believe it's the case in the situation though. Experience tells me that most people don't realize that protesting through destructive means rarely works well...

Valve never said that the game was "open source", just that the source code for the "game logic" is available, similar to how it is with HL2. At some point, people (and press?) got confused and keep calling it open source, despite that it's not really different from the other moddable Source engine games that you can use as base. The intent being opening up avenues of modding, but the game still depends on large binary blobs to compile and is releases under a restricted license.

Valve probably didn't intend to mislead people, unlike the whole "Shared source" crap by Microsoft.

Bit funny that you use "Steam-junkie gamer buddy" as a example since Steam is apparently going to be officially released on Linux within a few months. Of course, time still have to prove whenever it's good or not (GPU drivers is still somewhat problematic for Linux).

But I have to agree that you need to introduce Linux (and OSS) where it makes sense to.

I like Nethack, thank you very much. It's steep learning curve is part of the charm, and the fact that lots of things can kill you. It's not a game for the impatient.

You might want to check out the Diablo series. Blizzard themselves admitted that they were inspired by Nethack (and Angband) when they made Diablo, AFAIK people still play it and is very hyped for Diablo III.

If you want to see popular games with awful UI, you might want to check Dwarf Fortress. Manages to be way worse than Nethack (with even steeper learning curve), but is very popular. Not open source however.

I don't try to claim that the average open source is innovative, rather I was trying to point out a huge exception (innovative dosen't mean it have to be mainstream friendly). I have a feeling it's much easier to get developers together to make a clone of a already loved game (which then can be improved upon), than something new and original.

For innovation, I'd personally rather look amongst what the indie developers offer.

What about Nethack? It's probably still one of the more original Roguelikes out there, with a long legacy. :) I believe some "original commercial" games was actually inspired by Nethack.

I see. But I seem to recall there was (or just has been) a large RAM shortage around the time (1994) Transport Tycoon was released. :)