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Comment by the8472 | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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