Abandoned dreams

I find myself more and more drawn into the retro movement in my search for quality games. Playing games I haven't played since I was a kid is great fun. It also brings back great memories of a better time in gaming. When games were hard and before it was socially acceptable. Now it seems everyone and their grandmother (literally) is playing games, and the games reflect this mob mentality. But at a time when patent and property rights issues abound, some have simply given up.

It's called Abandonware.

It's a sad example of the times we live in. When companies are so afraid to relent something so simple as the code the games are made with for fear they might actually - gasp - be useful to someone else. I've been pleasantly surprised to play games like Stunts and Warcraft that I used to play back in the day.

How odd that companies like Blizzard and EA can demand so much for their products when they are produced, then simply condone their piracy once it becomes profitable to do so. All the while not having to show what exactly that program is doing, game or not. I suppose they are cautious of someone reworking them and actually making them better. Stunts is a game I could see being great if it were brought up to today's standards. Warcraft (that would be the ORIGINAL) is still a fun game today if simple.

Even more surprising was what led to me finding these two games in particular - the PCLinuxOS Gnome repository. I recently installed the newer distro and found many dosbox games already in the repos.

This was a pleasant surprise but it made me look at game companies in much broader terms. When a company like Blizzard treats something that in reality is a game that few play like a sacred scroll that needs to be buried, I begin to worry about games as a whole. What about the huge libraries of NES and SNES games that Nintendo has most of the rights to? What happens when these companies stop giving a hoot, what then? It's great that they might today, but ask yourself, will they tomorrow? What is their incentive to do so?

In any case, is it really asking too much to release the source for these old games and programs? If they're not being used anyway, they can be given away to others who might. It seems foolish at this point to clutch source code of a 10 year old program. Any project that goes more than a year without work anymore is declared dead by the community. People show up and see no others currently active, and leave. No big deal. (Though it would be nice to have a compiled Nestopia binary - hint hint). Yet companies can keep a project afloat as long as they need to - then, simply abandon it.