Al Lowe reveals his Sierra source code collection | Hacker News Reader

Al Lowe reveals his Sierra source code collection

arstechnica.com

240 pointsvatueil125 comments

Al Lowe, if you're reading, I am humbly asking you to consider putting all the source code you have for Sierra etc. games up to GitHub for all of us to {gaze|look|worship...}. Let the collectors have the pleasure of having it all on the original physical medias, but let the rest of us mere mortals have access to the essence.

Edit: alas, it's pointed out that above may not be possible as IP is owned by someone else.

That out of the way - Your / Sierra games had such a profound impact on my life. I would go as far as to say that without Leisuresuit Larry,Space|Police|Kings Quest and others I might have never started [seriously] learning English and mastered it to the point that later I was able to move abroad and eventually immigrate to the new world. ( btw - that statement probably pretty much accounts for any possible problems with my English and poor choice of language at times ;-) )

If he can't give the source away on github because he doesn't own the IP, then he can't sell it either. But he is.

Not true. Otherwise you wouldn't be allowed to sell paintings you own, but don't also own the copyright to reproduce digitally. Copyright and ownership of physical artifacts are two different things.

No, that's not how it works. Al Lowe is indeed violating copyright by selling these. You can't just go selling your ex-employers source code because it "happened to be on your laptop". It's absolutely a copyright violation.

The reason you can sell physical goods is because of the first sale doctrine and alike. Al Lowe never bought this source code on physical media; rather he created it during his employment. Thus he is not permitted to sell it.

All true. It's a unique case here in that by the time the copyright period expires, the media will probably be unreadable.

The idea of copyright is to reward creativity for a limited time and then give that work to the public. If the work can't ever fall into public hands then I'd argue it shouldn't get copyright protection.

Obviously that's a public policy debate, not a justification for breaking the law but it makes me hesitant to judge someone who takes a risk for the benefit of us all.

Yeah, I ought to point out that I agree with everything you've written. I'm far from a proponent of how wide reaching copyright laws are these days. Thanks, Disney!

Nonetheless, despite not being a lawyer, and having never taken a single legal class during my education; I still find myself regularly correcting other professionals misunderstanding of copyright laws. It would be so easy for someone to seriously ruin their life by not understanding this stuff. Although, that's largely a flaw of our overly complicated legal system, and far from being exclusively the individuals fault.

A quibble: The source code belongs to Al Lowe’s ex-employer only if he had a work for hire agreement in place with them. Copyright is implicit and, unless otherwise agreed to, belongs to the creator by default. Anything I write (including code) I have the right to copy unless I transfer that right.

(This, by the way, is why your employer requires that you sign those “we own everything you create while you work for us” documents.)

Edit: But this case seems to hinge on Al selling the physical media, rather than the IP rights. More like selling a used book.

This depends on your jurisdiction, and in many places precedence has been set by case law.

But generally, unfortunately, no. If you create something "on the clock" or using your employer's hardware (even in your free time), then the copyright is typically implicitly transferred to your employer.

EDIT: This is actually covered in season 1 of Silicon Valley... Yeah, legit reference, I know ;)

This is true only if explicitly called out in documents you sign when you join the company, or sign a consulting contract. There needs to be language that calls this out.

Mind you, pretty much every US company has that as part of their HR policy or contract agreement.

Sorry, that's not the case. The relevant laws governing this are called "work for hire".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire

Other countries don't necessarily have it spelled out so clearly, but instead leave it to case law. However, it's mostly the same around the globe.

The contracts are so your employer owns inventions created outside of work hours, not using employer equipment. This part of your employment agreement is actually frequently contested and deemed unenforceable unless the work is in the same area of expertise as your full-time employment i.e. using knowledge from your job. But it comes down to individual cases.

EDIT: It's covered on the Wikipedia page I've linked. However, just to clarify, the act of being employed is automatically considered work for hire by the legislation. If you're not an employee, but rather a contractor, then you may explicitly form a work for hire agreement in writing as part of the contract.

I stand corrected.

I'd like to point out that the credits for the games in question include a group of engine programmers which I assume is included in said source code.

According to an addendum to the listing, the engine is not included.

archive.org!

So funny, I also first leaned English from Leisure Suit Larry. I remember being stuck on "TAKE OFF CLOTHES" for the longest time.

How perfect: he used Elephant Memory Systems floppy disks -- they never forget!

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/s-l16...

I loved my Elephant t-shirt!

https://www.etsy.com/listing/603919849/vintage-80s-1981-elep...

This seems so odd to me since I remember when Elephant was the new cool kid on the block; cooler than Verbatim etc.

We were a BASF/3M house. And they were $5 a pop. If you could find a place that sold floppy disks at all.

FAO Schwartz to the rescue!

I am interested but not enough to pay over $1000. I actually hope that some (well all) of this code makes it to the computer history museum.

If rare video game market is anything like I think it is, this will disappear into a jealous "private collector". You'll never ever see the source code because they feel that dumping or providing digital copies of the disks would degrade the value of their collection. And public suffers just a little more under greed and selfishness.

> And public suffers just a little more under greed and selfishness.

I don't know if "I don't have a copy of King's Quest 3 source code" counts as suffering.

The public suffers anytime knowledge is lost.

Will the public suffer from not knowing what this comment said a century from now?

Yes. Already massive amounts of data have been lost to the grind of technology forging 'forward'.

As we lose the information, we lose context, and without context 'facts' about the past begin to lose meaning to the present reader.

History, and the stories we have, is/are mankind's most important asset. Without the context of our past as a species, we lose the ability to navigate into the future effectively (without crossing into unfortunate places again, like world war, or slavery, etc.).

We have nothing but stories. Without those, we are nothing.

I think that raises an interesting problem - if you want to look back 1000 years the sources are scarce, and largely composed of the thoughts of the educated or the wealthy - people who could read and write and store these items.

500 years from now we're going to be faced with a totally different problem - if a user wants to learn about the year 2018 where do they start? Official documents will appear to be stored beside the thoughts of Kardashians besides trolls. It'll be very hard to parse through any information to get an actual sense of what was happening.

I mean, it's the same problem, using the primary sources to try and figure out the truth, but it'll be the opposite problem as we have now.

https://www.amazon.com/Glasshouse-Charles-Stross/dp/04410150... describes a different problem. In the 27th century the 21st century is considered a dark age not because anything particularly bad happened but just because data archival technology took a big step back. Early storage media were far more fragile than paper.

I was hoping someone would reference that. One of my favorite Stross books, and a decade since reading it I frequently think back to it and worry about this mass of data we’re creating and obsoleting each year.

> Early storage media were far more fragile than paper.

That's true, but on a timeline of human history that's a pretty brief window and there was a lot of distrust in the medium at that time. We're going to have ~30 years where they have to rely on the old methodologies still, but the 20th century is a whole new ball game. They won't be able to retrieve circa 2000 floppy disks, no, but I feel like a lot of what's been around for the last decade is going to probably stick around.

"Beatles 3000" is my go-to reference here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z2vU8M6CYI

I missed that one somehow. I will be forever indebted to you.

500 years from now we will likely have strong AI capable of rapidly processing the exabytes of data we produced in this day and age as a unit test for the self-modifying system updates.

That being said, on a timescale as long as 5 centuries, I don't think anyone can even begin to fathom in the slightest with any degree of confidence what anything will be like. I just hope the advances this century might make it a possibility I can exist long enough to see it myself.

> I don't think anyone can even begin to fathom in the slightest with any degree of confidence what anything will be like

You dont even need to talk in 5 centuries. 5 decades themselves should be sufficient to be unpredictable.

It's a good point, but by then we'll have software to model the relationships between all of the known sources - New York Times Journalists, Reddit Trolls, etc., and filter out some of the craziness.

As have more and more information the context is loss anyway, we cant glean it from the noise, and even if we could most of us wouldnt care about it anyway, we are busy making our own context.

The fact that we cant access some old software is not a loss akin to forgetting our enslavement of others, and really we need no such memory, we enslave people today.

#peakhackernews calamity strikes, hacker news comment is lost in the mists of time, mankind doomed

The public would benefit slightly from having the comment as part of the complete conversation, so yes.

This comment in isolation? Maybe not. This whole conversation? It's certainly informative — from it, you can read a lot into the feelings about conservationism within this community. There's some form of value to be had from that.

Yes. A lot can be gained from reading any projects source code. This stuff is just as valuable today as it was when it was written. A programmer would learn a lot by reading this source code.

Such as with IP law.

But this is property, not knowledge...

Well, this is both property and knowledge. I'd argue that the information content is more "real", since information is a real property of things in the universe. Property is a (useful) abstraction that humans have collectively agreed on, so that people don't get clubbed as often as in the past.

Agree. Context, people. First world suffering at best.

Is there a non-profit that would be willing to buy this stuff specifically for archival purposes if a bunch of folks pooled their money to that effect?

Frank Cifaldi and the Video Game archive do a lot of preservation work. https://gamehistory.org/

Should have just donated it to archive.org instead of making a quick buck out of it.

Well you're free to do this bit of charity after buying it yourself.

Well no, he says in the post he doesn't own the IP. The winner could post it, but it'd probably have to be as a torrent or from a country that won't enforce the IP/copyright.

Unfortunately, it's still copyrighted and so cannot be legally displayed or distributed by the internet archive for another ~65 years (95 years from publication for copyright to expire). Many of us won't be alive to see this code legally.

The copyright period could also increase again if the law retroactively increases it again.

Yea that's what confuses me. Is he even legally allowed to sell this stuff? Should he even still have that stuff?! This gets into sketchy legal ground.

I wish he had contacted the German company he claims currently owns the rights and just asked if he could post it all up for free. It's not like it's going to hurt sales on platforms like GoG if they still have it up. He's already gotten some of the rights back for LSL1 at least when he did that remake (which honestly isn't all that great). He could have posted all the code and then sold the originals too; so it's in the commons and one person gets to be a collector and everyone wins.

So .. EA doesn't own this? I thought Sierra was owned by EA (or got bought by some company that got bought by EA). I know The LSL rights went to some other company for a bit who produced the two PC/PlayStation Larry games (the university and movie one. Honestly I liked the University one; don't know why people hated on it. It was funny).

It’s like selling a copy of a book that you own. Unless you signed some sort of confidentiality agreement, there’s nothing that prohibits you from transferring the physical copy to someone else.

Software is different from books. The EULA that you implicitly sign may prevent you from transferring ownership to someone else.

There could be such a thing about books, it’s just that nobody does it. This guy worked for the company. He is not covered by that sort of license agreement, though definitely something could’ve been in his employment contract about the company’s property. Since he’s not claiming to own the code or the license to it, it’s physical property, not intellectual property. And with software, when it is covered by such a license agreement, typically you can do exactly this – sell your physical copy without claiming that you’re transferring any rights.

I think a better comparison would be owning the original manuscript. I might own the original manuscript to The Hobbit but that doesn't mean I can publish it.

Correct, you couldn’t copy it and re-distribute, but you could sell your original copy.

I'm gonna take a guess that technically these disks were bought with Sierra money and aren't his except for the fact that they were lost to time from company inventory perspective

He has the right to sell the physical artifacts, its the IP laws that complicate everything.

Yeah, I'm not sure where Al Lowe got "German company". Sierra for a long while was owned by French company Vivendi, though. It's Activision Blizzard that bought all of Vivendi's game assets (not EA).

There might be a German Company involved in sublicensing LSL games specifically from Activision Blizzard? Most recent sublicense was Replay Games, I think? I don't think they are (were?) German either, but I'm not sure. There was a lot of weird drama with the LSL sublicense between Kickstarters and Activision Blizzard side projects, and I didn't follow it very well.

One possible German company that was entangled with Sierra IP rights might be the former Deep Silver (Koch Media), because of THQ? Deep Silver bought a lot of IP assets from THQ including possibly some portion of Relic Entertainment's IP, which was a Sierra published studio. Though that German company no longer exists as such, because Deep Silver was recently purchased by THQ Nordic reuniting more of the THQ IP in Scandinavia.

But also, that doesn't hold a lot of water, potentially, because it seems like Gearbox bought Relic's IP in the THQ bankruptcy, not Deep Silver.

Though all of the above does help illustrate why game IP rights are so complicated and byzantine and a lot of classics are languishing because no one properly understands who has the real IP rights.

(The "NOLF Paradox" as some of us call it these days. Which I just realize is funny because Sierra was the original NOLF co-publisher, too.)

Doesn't IA have an explicit copyright exemption for some purposes? See: their playable copies of some games.

how does it work when the copyright is unknown or what happens if a company/trademark folded (that might have held the copyright) does the company who reastablishes the brand get the ip?!

I mean if the game was published under Sierra Entertainment 19xx and the company folded, is it still legally unforceable, even if the new company is now activision?

If a copyright owner dies (without their IP being inherited) or the company dies (and its ip is not sold or kept by some individual of the company), then the material effectively enters the public domain. Note, this is only 'effectively' because it is still possible someone does have the IP and you were simply not aware. It's also possible the person who owns the copyright isn't even aware they own it, but it can still later be discovered and enforced.

In practice, it is very difficult to verify when either of those events occur. I expect Sierra Entertainment's IP has been kept alive, even if the company itself died at any point in the past.

It's almost always safer to just wait the full duration for copyright to expire and it to enter real public domain.

If you're unable to safely wait around 100 years to legally access the material, well, that sucks I guess. Copyright is meant to ensure the public gets access to such material, and it's not the government's fault people don't live over 100 years to enjoy material made in their lifetimes.

It's just law. There's also a practical side to this. You could go ahead, and then if a copyright holder emerges, you have to settle it with them somehow. That could end really badly or it could end up being not much of an issue.

I mean, the government choose the term. So it actually is their fault if people don't live to see the end of the term, even if the human lifespan itself is not their fault.

> I mean, the government choose the term

I think it's also fair to say that Disney has chosen the term and the government has failed to do its job.

The last bit of my comment was meant to be tongue-in-cheek.

I rather somebody has it in some trusted hand even if they can't release it for another 65 years, rather than lost forever. Preservation of human culture/knowledge is more important than copyright, I know a foreign concept most people will be to ignorant about to agree with.

Who gives a shit? Just upload it anonymously. Nobody even knew he had the source code until now.

Except it's not anonymous since Al will know who he sold each game to - won't be that hard to find out who the guilty party is.

> Many of us won't be alive to see this code legally.

Dunno about you, but for me, it's hard to imagine an 85 year old in the year 2083 even caring about seeing this code legally.

It’s likely akin to an 85 year old today caring about schematics for a Model T.

There are still people who do.

I miss typing commands in the classic sierra games. Trying to figure out the right commands and names of items was much more fun than the point and click games that followed. Also you never know when you would stumble upon a joke while saying something ridiculous.

~Am I understanding wrong or is Leisure Suit Larry not a classic?~

Edit: I misunderstood

I played everything. Kings Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest... hated it when they went the 'point-n-click' way.

Still whistle the police Quest opening tune to my daughters sometimes... What are you whistling daddy? How do you get the experience of classic adventure games across...?

I’ll never forget being stuck for months until I learned “INSERT CARTRIDGE”. Great memories indeed :)

Leisure Suit Larry was the first game I played as a kid that felt “adult” and “naughty”. Somehow that made it irresistible to my younger self. This brings back some great memories. Thanks for sharing!

I played Softporn Adventure on my Apple ][, which Leisure Suit Larry was based on.

There was a casino that let you bet negative amounts at the blackjack table, then lose on purpose to make lots of money!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softporn_Adventure

Then there was "Interlude: The Ultimate Experience". It came with a paperback book full of naughty stuff, which my pirate friend gave me a xeroxed copy of to go with the floppy disk.

https://boingboing.net/2012/08/10/sexy-video-game-from-the-a...

You'd load the game on the computer, run it, answer some questions, and it would tell you and your (probably imaginary) partner: "For a good time, turn to page 74 for Interlude No. 82 - Caveman Caper!"

Looks like this PDF has the table of contents, but it's missing all the "good" parts:

http://www.brutaldeluxe.fr/projects/cassettes/syntonic/k7_sy...

And I'll never forget the HyperCard Smut Stack! ("ping!")

> There was a casino that let you bet negative amounts at the blackjack table, then lose on purpose to make lots of money!

Sounds a bit like one of the early bugs on Amazon.com:

https://youtu.be/-hxX_Q5CnaA

As a German kid with nothing but a dictionary, and no clue who people like Nixon were, those questions took me some dedication and note taking to suss out by trial and error. It wasn't even the lure of the forbidden so much, I just didn't want to miss a thing, I loved Larry 1-3 so much. Still adore the music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1om9GlBhn8&t=3m17s

Oh yeah! Ladies and gentlemen, Al Lowe!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLXSGPY4Pkw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUokHW32jL4

I gave a copy of Leisure Suit Larry to a friend in late primary school (I guess I was 12). His parent called my Dad and had a whinge and he basically laughed at them.

Ah, good times.

Me too. Iirc, this game featured “adult” multiple choice questions you had to answer before you could play the game.

EBay seems like the worst possible place for this. Why not donate it to some organisation that would work out a way for people to look at at least parts of the code?

Why? Amazon auctions never really took off. He got in the news ( see this post). He got what he wanted.

A lot of arbitrage/sales still happens on eBay, it's not hard when the sellers are looking at #1 to earn money on #2

I meant with regards to the loss for society when this disappears into some private collection. I’d be better in a museum. I am sure he’ll earn enough short term money from the auctions.

It’s been disappeared in a private collection for years.

I’m sure he’s cool with someone buying all the stuff to form a private collection.

I kinda agree on that. The loss for society of the source code of an old game.....

I don't see any extra value. I do agree it would be nice to see the source code and look at it. Some have an emotional attachment to it, but if it wouldn't have been sold/shared, nobody would have cared or request it.

Or why not surreptitiously let it go into the hands of the pirates, which may at-least ensure its distribution.

I remember my father taking me to see the Sierra offices, right by Coarsegold, CA. They were closed, but it was a fun trip, given how happy those games made my childhood. I know I am not the only one here.

Coarsegold CA... the setting of Freddy Pharkas Frontier Pharmacist, the gamr that was arguably "peak" Al Lowe. The jokes didn't let up for a minute!

Same with me, but they were open. We walked in and they just gave us a tour. I remember they were working on Space Quest 3 and showed us what it sounded like on the Roland MT-32. I was lucky my Dad was super into technology so as soon as we got home he went out and bought one.

I wish somebody would make available the Civil War Generals code base. It's getting painful to keep a VM ready to be able to play it. I would gladly pay for a legal modernised version

It seems you can play it natively with Steam Play for Linux, DosBox, or WINE.

Can you? I didn't think dosbox handled windows games. I've been keeping an XP vm around just for this.

In the original Leisure suit larry, there was actually a (really long) time limit. I don't know how anyone could ever hit it by accident, since the game pauses for input pretty regularly. The VGA remake removed the time limit.

Semi-OT: Anyone who knows who holds the copyright and/or source code to Sierra's Earth Siege 2, please contact me by the email in my profile! I'd be really happy if someone can shed a light here...

Currently Hi-Rez Studios at least has the rights to distribute the full series, since they legally have the ISOs available to download as a promotion for Tribes: Ascend. https://www.tribesuniverse.com

Argh - just send these to Jason Scott to archive responsibly instead....

Looks like the 3.5" floppies have had the hole punch treatment to increase capacity! That wasn't always great for reliability as I remember it...

Um, hole punching was used on 5 1/4" and 8" floppies, not 3.5".

I guess, because technically most people used a drill for 3.5” disks.

Did see this photo? https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/s-l16...

Hrm....he says he hasn't tested it, but there was a remake of the game, and Lowe supposedly worked with them on it. You'd think they'd have jumped to at least examine the original source. Or maybe they explicitly decided not to check if the IP rights were owned by a different company than the one that owned the copyright for the code itself.

Why would they? Code from 1987 is of exactly zero interest to someone developing a game in 2013.

It's a text command driven game, isn't it? Getting an encyclopedic listing of all of the different text that the original recognized would be most easily handled by reading it from the original code.

I suppose just examining the original media might have been enough. Or maybe they abandoned that command style? I didn't play the remake.

It was a remake of a remake, actually.

In 1991, they remade the original Leisure Suit Larry to be a traditional point-and-click adventure game. It's referred to as Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards or just Leisure Suit Larry 1 VGA. The modern-day remake was an update of the point-and-click version.

If they wanted to referrer to the original dialogue or images, it's easy to do without the source. ScummVM and other projects already have tools out there to extract all the game data from old Sierra games.

Sierra games did not use SCUMM. That was LucasArts (the MM stands for Maniac Mansion).

SCUMMVM can read many other non-SCUMM game files these days.

https://scummvm.org/compatibility/

Wow, had no idea. TIL thanks!

if he were to actually care about digital preservation he would just put all of it on github even anonymously. But he doesn't so he doesn't. I know what Jason Scott would do.

Where does he claim to care about digital preservation? And I'm pretty sure GitHub would have to remove code posted without permission, anonymous or not.

But by the time they got around to removing it there would be thousands of backups around the world

This brings back memories I hadn't recalled in a long time.

https://youtu.be/nyZ2X73VrGs

First, what's the legal status of this code?

Second, should we do an immediate crowd funding campaign to purchase this, and make the contents available to everyone?

> First, what's the legal status of this code?

Apparently it is currently owned by a German entertainment company:

"Realize that, while you’ll have my data as of the day of Larry 1’s creation, you will not own the intellectual property rights to the game, the code, the art, or anything else," Lowe says in the LSL1 listing. "Nor do I. The IP rights were sold over and over again, until they are now owned by a German game company."

Correct me if I'm wrong but he can't legally sell these disks then right (at least before wiping them first)?

He can, he just can't make copies of them. It's like selling an used book.

In the US, it's called the First-sale doctrine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

He may not have such rights. It’s unlikely he was legally allowed to have this copy of the code; he likely just kept the copy because he felt like it.

If the copyright owner didn’t sell/transfer/contract this to him, he basically has a stolen copy.

I do wish this copy is legally transferable; I suspect it is not.

Yea that's what I thought.

This might have been made before modern NDAs and all the IP documents you handover when you join a tech shop today, or maybe Ken and Roberta W made some special deal with him since he was there really early on with the company?

Even if that's not the case, there's a good chance all the original contracts were lost too. I mean, it really all depends on if Activision (or whoever currently owns the original LSL/Sierra IP) finds out and decides to come after him.

Vampires of corporate law will never miss this chance. Of course they will sue him to bankruptcy.

Anyone know the odds of the floppies still working? I'm guessing some will and some won't. They must be nearing or past expiration date...

Well the Elephant Memory Systems floppy disks claim to "Never Forget"!

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/s-l16...

https://youtu.be/v7AgSapZAi8?t=500

My anecdata is very strong for floppies from that era having a great chance of still working and there even some tech out there that can read borderline floppies and get the data from a population of reads using simple statistics.

These have enough artistic value to go to the Library of Congress or the Met.

I'm suddenly reminded of Betrayal in Antara. Man, that game was weird.

The Manhunter games were probably the weirdest ones from Sierra that no one really remembers...

Did anyone say Kult - The Temple of Flying Saucers?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeyZ57rWdGg&t=6m21s

I was obsessed with that game as a child, if it was remade it would have quick-save and be ruined :)

That and Future Wars are probably the first sci-fi games I played in the Amiga 500.

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