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Comment by suddenclarity | Hacker News Reader

Even he had some challenges with releasing Doom:

> The bad news: this code only compiles and runs on linux. We couldn't release the dos code because of a copyrighted sound library we used (wow, was that a mistake -- I write my own sound code now), and I honestly don't even know what happened to the port that microsoft did to windows.

I would assume it's a lot more complicated today. Even the most simple programming projects tend to have a ton of dependencies nowadays.

And it doesn't even account for the fact that you might be killing future projects by handing out the blueprint of old games. Would Assassin's Creed Valhalla exist if we had 100 clones of Assassin's Creed III?

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> Would Assassin's Creed Valhalla exist if we had 100 clones of Assassin's Creed III?

Probably, unless they all had the budget to create a shit ton of new assets and replace the old ones. And the code was released with a license that allowed commercial use.

> Probably, unless they all had the budget to create a shit ton of new assets and replace the old ones.

Isn't that what we're getting from AI generated content?

Note, I'm not saying that a random person will create something better. I'm just saying there might be a risk of saturating the market if you can play 100 versions of the same game for free.

This isn't how the games industry works for games at thia scale (or any other media). They are events. Millions of people having the same experience at the same time and having a common cultural touch point.

The 100s of clones would be more like fanfic. A set of people would get very into them, search out the good ones (perhaps better than the original), or revel in the terrible ones. But then the whole community still comes together to watch the latest marvel film anyway.

The main effect would be to build and maintain the community for the next commercial version.

Elder scrolls games are very moddable and people have made total conversions and map extensions. That didn't prevent the sales of newer TES games based on slightly improved engines and slightly better assets (fan-made assets are often still ahead of the official ones, but it takes years of refinement to get to that point).

That and things like Counter Strike / Day of Defeat that started as mods had a large number of maps back in the day. 99% of them were shit and weird experiments. The ones that did rise to the top eventually got incorporated into newer versions, and indeed became games in their own right.

DOTA as well, started as a mod for Warcraft 3 and eventually spawned a franchise.

Trying to capture ALL the value (in this case the game developer/publisher) is a mistake anyway. The healthiest game franchises have broad ecosystems around them. Releasing the source code of old games just encourages that.

If there is one set of games I wish were released it is Ambrosia Software's catalog. Of all their games the only one I can find that is open source is Maelstrom (It's the Escape Velocity series, I'd love to see opened).

dayz and the arma series aswell they would not have sold nearly the amount of copies without it, it also ended up as a standalone however controversial it might be.

For sure I bought like 5 copies of A2 for friends just so we could play DayZ mod together.

Ayyy, Day of Defeat was peak early 2000's FPS.

> If there is one set of games I wish were released it is Ambrosia Software's catalog.

And Chiral!

Man I'd love a Linux port of that game.

Escape Velocity was what got me into coding. I was huge into moding that game when I was younger on my old mac OS 7.x system. Absolutely fell in love with being able to extend the game.

Thanks for bringing that up. Those were good times. And agreed. Would love the source to original EV alone. Gonna take a gander at maelstrom! Thank you!

We walked a similar path. Fond memories of modding EV with ResEdit.

Before having an idea of how "proper" cracks should be done, EV copy protection was corrected in resedit by turning Cap'n Hector into an escape pod (so he couldn't kill you) and something else I forget right now to unlock some missions

I always wonder what happened with Ambrosia, they had a good library of games that they could update and could still sell but they just disappeared suddenly.

Updating and reselling their old games was the majority of their business for the last ~10 years of the company.

Their game library had some gems but they famously made most of their ga my es by ripping off other games. I’m guessing that didn’t scale.

Their biggest seller was a small Mac utility called Snapz Pro if memory serves.

They, frankly, were never a company run for anything other than milking a quick buck.

While not open source, I recently learned that you can still download windows versions of escape velocity in: https://escape-velocity.games/

That was one hell of a trip down the memory lane.

I didn't, though you can also play them on Infinite Mac.

Also if you haven't played Endless Sky, that's inspired by EV and open source.

This dynamic is conspicuously missing from modern gaming. I think the anti-moddability is one of the primary factors in the industry's enshittification. Maybe even worse than microtransactions.

There's no way I would have purchased Morrowind, if not for OpenMW.

> Would Assassin's Creed Valhalla exist if we had 100 clones of Assassin's Creed III?

You are over appreciating the geek's willingness to toil on assets and make up a compelling storyline :)

Not that Ubisoft games are worth playing, but for a single player game at least it can be much worse.

> And it doesn't even account for the fact that you might be killing future projects by handing out the blueprint of old games. Would Assassin's Creed Valhalla exist if we had 100 clones of Assassin's Creed III?

Releasing the old doom source code doesn't stop id software from making sequels all the way up to doom eternal.

> Would Assassin's Creed Valhalla exist if we had 100 clones of Assassin's Creed III?

Maybe not, but we would have 100 other games that may have expanded the genre further.

Less commercially motivated uninspired follow ups and more original content seems like a huge win for culture at large. Large video game and movie studios are mostly churning out copy-pasted garbage nowadays.

Looping back to doom, here is a free library of doom mods.

https://freedoom.github.io/

According to Doom Eternal's wiki, it sold 3 million copies in spite of all these free to play doom games.

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

In the very short term, sure. All of the discussions of this kind of thing (and of copyrights and patents in general) have this same very-short-term perspective. "Patents SUCK, they're MEANT to encourage innovation but it's been SIX MONTHS and we STILL can't use [technique X]." Sure, but 20 years from now that patent will expire and we'll all be able to use it thanks to the fact that it was patented, and so significant parts of the 'secret sauce' are a matter of public record.

In the case of Doom, the engines being released has lead to an active community developing the engine (eg. GZdoom which can now be played in VR, with ray tracing, fancy shading, etc.) on pretty much any hardware with a processor.

Still waiting for them to release RAGE 1 source code.

The secret sauce is more than a 10 year old engine.

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