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Comment by devwastaken | Hacker News Reader

I want a gaming community wherein every month an old multiplayer server based game is revived and people compete for prizes. The problem with this is that it requires good connections to the corporate owners of those games, to get permission to ship the .exe with a simple hex edit changing the master server list host. Or even add game modes. The intent being donations for various charities too of course.

There's still an existing community for games like the original PC Red Faction, as crazy as that is. Perfectly fun games, just needs players and some names in game streaming to pick it up.

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I've thought about this problem a lot too. In my mind, there is no "Adult rec league for eSports" that exists right now. I can go to my local rec center and sign up for adult soccer, football, volleyball to meet people and play for fun in a lightly competitive environment, but no one has done that for eSports yet.

I like the idea of booting up old games in that format as well.

It's definitely a hard problem, but with the increase in recreation time, especially for creative workers, that we're continuing to see I think it could be a big company.

> The problem with this is that it requires good connections to the corporate owners of those games, to get permission

Does it? There might be some games to avoid from publishers that are still active, but I imagine there's a ton of effectively-abandonware games out there to build your idea upon.

I think that's a chicken and egg problem. The community would exist around games that were/are popular (like Red Faction for example). You can't just shoehorn in any old abandonware game and call it a day for community building.

To be blunt: my suggestion is to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. Most people who technically hold the rights to those older games won't care enough about them to enforce it. If they do, they'll almost certainly start with a C&D which is basically free to respond to. Very little risk. By the time you're large enough for them to care about, you've already succeeded and can ask for permissions properly.

Maybe, or maybe they particularly consider a hex edit to be an infringement on their image of the product and think it will harm their chances of selling the rights for a remake. Therefore they sue you because they can. If you can't ask for permission, you're not in a place to ask for forgiveness either.

Fuck I miss Red Faction series - hit me right in the feels.

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