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Comment by omarhaneef | Hacker News Reader

So, when people make a clone like this, do they painstakingly recreate every piece: graphics, logic and so forth, or do they typically get access to some of the original code or graphics and transfer it over.

This thing looks like it was recreated from scratch.

edit: minor rewording.

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The Micropolis name was used to avoid hitting EA trademark, but it came from the original game's porting team:

https://wiki.laptop.org/go/Micropolis#History_and_Future_of_...

https://donhopkins.medium.com/har-2009-lightning-talk-transc...

AFAIK, they never recreate the graphics.

You write code that is able to read the assets (graphics, sound, etc) - like the original code is able to.

The short answer is it depends. In this case where you want to independently distribute a game in a playable state, you need to recreate everything from scratch in order to not violate copyright.

In other cases, they only implement the game code, and you need to source the maps, assets, etc from an original copy. The goal with this is usually to fix bugs and quality of life issues on modern systems, not to supplant the original game or any remaining sales of it. Good example of this IMHO is OpenRCT2 which provides an opensource client compatible with Rollercoaster Tycoon2.

> The short answer is it depends. In this case where you want to independently distribute a game in a playable state, you need to recreate everything from scratch in order to not violate copyright.

Unless the original is under a license which allows derivatives; e.g., the original SimCity specifically was released (as “Micropolis”, because of trademark issues) under GPLv3 in 2008, so GPLv3 downstream versions (like MicropolisJS) don't have to recreate anything from scratch to avoid copyright issues.

Looking at the docs for that, it looks like they had to redo most of the assets for exactly this reason. The person who put it on the web may not had to redo them, but someone did. https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/wiki/Assets.md

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