A Company Bringing Old Video Games Back from the Dead
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
The first interesting computer simulation game I remember playing was on the Apple II: Tuesday Night Football.
I tried forensically tracing the source. I ran across a listing on an Apple II archive site, and wanted to port it and share. But being conscious of IP rights, just having the source wasn't enough. I wanted to track it down. And in doing so, I ran across Charlie Anderson.
http://blog.firebones.com/2008/02/10/looking-for-tuesday-nig...
My update to that post:
More digging led me to the author of the original Tuesday Night Football, Charlie Anderson, and some artifacts related to the original version. It appears that after a brief life being sold through Apple dealers with mimeographed manuals and a disk stuffed in a plastic bag, Mr. Anderson was offered the sum of $1000 against 10% net royalties to assign the copyright of the game to Automated Simulations, Inc., which rechristened it as Tuesday Morning Quarterback.
A company acquired another company, and the trail went cold when the rights landed in some UK company circa 1990.
If ever there were a case for some kind of laws around abandonware and extending the life of forgotten software, this is it.
Since it's a BASIC listing and there's some intrinsic educational value in being distributed in source code form, we believe our distribution of it falls under fair use.
I already had the source, but over time I've acquired an IP conscience that wouldn't let me go as far as you've gone. (Seeing Charlie Anderson explain to me stuff about his program that I would have known had I not been using a pirated copy was a wakeup call, even though he was far from his $1000 and 10% days.) But perhaps when software is 30+ years old, it is better to seek forgiveness than ask permission.
Is there any way to contribute to Discorunner? It seemed kind of resource intensive when I last used it, and wanted to look at source to see if I could help, but I didn't see any way to contribute.