Source Code for Area 51 (2005) by Midway Studios Austin Found at Garage Sale | Hacker News Reader

Source Code for Area 51 (2005) by Midway Studios Austin Found at Garage Sale

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203 pointsandrew_rfc73 comments

As you may have gathered from the list of home systems, this is not the light gun arcade shooter you remember from childhood. It appears to be a 2005 addition to that franchise.

And it is, actually, a pretty decent game!

Like the little-known console sequels to Far Cry, you later get infected with the gunk you're dealing with and it opens up the game a bit by adding extra abilities.

Agreed, I remember getting it in an Xbox demo disk and playing the same level over and over again.

Just like the better-known sequels to Jak and Daxter!

You mean the Crysis series? With no doubt tens of millions of sales[1] by this point in time and AAA marketing budgets, I’m not so sure they’re little-known. Apologies if you’re referring to something else of course.

1: https://www.vgchartz.com/game/226218/crysis/

I think he was referring to the Xbox far cry sequels far cry instinct and far cry evolution. seems they really are not well known.

Yeah, those.

Wow they built a whole game engine and editor just for this game, and they got David Duchovny and Marilyn Manson to voice act in it! And now it lives in obscurity

FWIW, most games before early 2000s built all their tooling from scratch as there wasn't off the shelf engines to use. Unreal engine came out in 98 and Source in 2004

I think some of the early FPS engines were re-used, with Rise of the Triad using the Wolfenstein 3d one.

Engines that come to mind: XnGine (Daggerfall, Terminator, ...), Dark Engine (Thief, System Shock 2), Build (Duke 3D, Blood...). Yes, they existed before the 2000s, but the difference to today is that there were many engines being reused for a handful of games at most. Today it's few engines running most games.

Battlefield, gta, alan wake, ms flightsim, cyberpunk, hogsward (unreal) all top games with different engines. Agree that unreal engine has many games, but plenty of alternatives

That's a pretty small selection of well-known AAA games. Those few examples really don't change the general skew towards using 3rd party engines these days vs. few games doing something like that in the 90s. And in fact, most of these engines have also been reused between games (with heavy modifications of course - e.g. Remedy's Northlight engine has been evolving since Alan Wake 1).

Build engine duke nukem also used in many other games like blood etc. Same for quake engine. Even doom engine was used in games like hexen. Doom was also an evolution of the wolfenstein engine. Quake 1 to later quake engines all evolutions and used in a lot of other games. These are all 3d engines. On the nes, snes and sega machines the same platform engine was reused in 1000s of games. Same for sound engines, physics engines etc. My point is. I dont think there is a lot of difference. Innovation still happening today. Not everything is Unreal.

> On the nes, snes and sega machines the same platform engine was reused in 1000s of games.

No, this isn't true. Almost all games were bespoke back in that era - the machines simply weren't powerful enough to allow for competitive, flexible game engines. An individual development house might have a code library or base that they'd iterate on, but there was little sharing between different companies (much less reuse by the thousands).

By the 16-bit era sound engines did tend to be widely reused, though (e.g. GEMS).

Honestly it seems like it always has: there are a handful of dev houses using their own engine for a spread of games (e.g. EA with Frostbite, Ubi with Anvil, Rockstar with RAGE, Bungie with whatever they call the Halo/Destiny engine these days), then UE or Unity are out there mass licensed for a whole bunch of stuff, then the few less widely licensed engines like Source.

That's not how it always has been. Licensing engines was virtually unknown 30 years ago (and when it happened at all it was within a very narrow range for making games in the same genre, more like asset swaps and level packs than outright new games), and new and exciting in the '00s.

Yeah sorry I meant from, like, 2000-ish and on.

I wanted to mention the odd adventure game Normality as using the Doom engine, but I can't find a source

I'm pretty sure Normality ran on the in-house Gremlin Interactive engine that powered the excellent Realms of the Haunting.

+1 for the Daggerfall mention. I haven't thought about that game in 1000 years and loved it.

You’ve reminded me of Return to Castle Wolfenstein. It was very limited in terms of maps and possible multiplayer only. It was fantastic.

Wasn’t Quake 1 reasonably off the shelf for its time? Released in ‘96, it did have a map editor and a number of games were built with it.

Source itself being built from Quake 1…

idTech 2 was specifically built for Quake 1, and only later it was licensed to other developers as well. So it was not an off-the shelf solution id could simply take for building Quake. It was tailored for that game.

They specifically built Quake to sell the engine. They knew it would be difficult to actually sell an engine without a successful title.

Interesting, I’ve never heard about that. Do you have a source?

I don't think they specifically understood the idea of a "game engine" as the core product at the time. But there are plenty of references if you Google a bit that Quake was designed for modders due to the popularity of DOOM mods - so developer experience was absolutely taken into account from the start.

They had already done licensing deals for the DOOM engine at that point, including the greatest game of all time "Chex Quest."

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

Yeah, this is why Quake's logic for a lot of game things - monsters, weapons, moving platforms - is written in a byte-code interpreted language (QuakeC). The idea was to separate it from the engine code so modders could easily make new games without needing access to the full engine source. (And QuakeC was supposed to be simpler as a language than C, which it... is, but at the cost of weird compromises like a single number type (float) which is also used to store bitfields by directly manipulating power of two values. Which works, of course, until your power of 2 is big enough to force the precision to drop below 1...)

Keep in mind that they had developed a good relationship with Raven Software and made a good chunk of money off of their use of idTech 1 for Heretic.

Quake 3 was probably the first time the id really built a game to demonstrate an engine for the sake of engine sales. And then again with Rage.

Won't really work on consoles like PS1 and PS2.

Jedi Knight 2 came out in 2002 and the original Call of Duty came out in 2003, both running heavily modified versions of John Carmack's Quake III engine

Valve originally started in 1996 by licensing the Quake engine for Half-Life.

id sold a few Doom and a bunch of Quake 1/2/3 licenses back in the day. Off the top of my head: Heretic and Hexen used the Doom engine, their sequels used the Quake and Quake 2 engines respectively. Strife was an FPS RPG that was Doom based. Half-Life started out as a HEAVILY modified Quake engine and rumor has it that there is still a bit of Quake code in Source. Duke Nukem Forever started out on Quake before moving to Unreal.

Call of Duty and Medal of Honor both used id Tech 3 (aka the Quake 3 engine), as did some of the Star Wars games, etc. Unfortunately, The Source Engine came out around the time of id Tech 4, and it really took the reins, with Unreal Engine hitting a stride thereafter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id_Tech_3#Games_using_a_propri...

I heard an interview about Doom port to hmm 3DO? and it cost them one time payment of $50K cash money to outright buy Doom assets + game engine license.

id Tech engines, Renderware and a few other big ones were for sure available at the time and used. Earlier, during 90's was another situation however.

That reminds me of how Torque [0] debuted in 2001 using Tribes 2.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque_(game_engine)

Torque was pretty instrumental in kick-starting my career. Glad it's still being maintained to this day (despite it arguably getting steamrolled by unity and mismanagement).

The Quake 3 engine was incredibly popular in the early 2000s.

That's not quite true. There were plenty of 90s game engines. They just weren't as general purpose. So you would end up rewriting a good chunk anyways to get what you wanted.

They managed to do this to Quake.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SGknUiihpkI

There were game engines in the 90s -- Quake Engine, Build Engine, Unreal Engine.. to name some of the popular ones.

You also had GoldSrc, a modified Quake Engine for Half-Life 1.

Many companies created their own and was not available outside the business. Dark Engine used in the Thief:Dark Project games is an example. Think of companies like Nintendo having their own engine which powered games like Mario 64 and, I believe, Ocarina of Time was a modified version of that.

The "off the shelf" engines available at that time (like Unreal or Quake engine) might have been decent for certain type of games.

Today, you could say many games could be done with Unity, Godot, or Unreal. There are still companies today using their own.

A lot of games did this.

Like each Final Fantasy game on the PS2 is a new engine. Each Resident Evil.

There was Renderware I guess to share liek Unreal. But that's it.

Not like these new game devs. I can really tell these new games are so unoptimized.

I mean look at this. Is this progress?? Not really. And 2024 has just waaaaay worse performance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5fr1R8kZzI

And that's because most people don't really care about performance, just that it works.

The most important thing is that something exists not that it's at its peak performance.

Thats sad. Anyone can feel a difference in fps. MOST people DO care. Show them side by side.

So yea.

Shit devs.

I feel we are going backwards in quality. Like wtf happened. Look at the video. Just shit.

A game from 2015 and 2024 looks the same.

X-Com Files on OpenXcom is my latest favorite retro Android game.

Andrew initially had a rough disassembly-only dump of the retail Area 51 on GitHub in a (quickly abandoned) attempt to remaster it. He must have gotten lucky here, or maybe more likely a previous developer tossed him a (very nice) bone.

> or maybe more likely a previous developer tossed him a (very nice) bone.

This is what I am thinking. It seems a long shot the source code was simply discovered at a garage sale by chance. Too much coincidence that a. the THQ dev still had the code just kicking around and b. a computer savvy person happened upon this garage sale, buys said artifact and discovers the code. Stars must have been aligned.

I think the THQ dev likely knew the "buyer" or someone put them in touch and the cover story is "oops, I accidentally sold the source at a garage sale" in case lawyers get involved.

I like this thinking. It could trigger the discovery of a bunch of cool stuff at garage sales.

> It was found at a garage sale of a former THQ developer.

This would be interesting to know more about. Was it on a CD, or maybe left on the disk of an old PC? I wonder how much old source code is hanging out in developer's attics and basements around the world, before git/online repos were a thing.

There's probably a lot lying around.

Back in the early 2000s, or maybe late 1990s, I was a big fan of a PC game that ended up being a total commercial failure for the studio and publisher. It was so bad the studio went under, and the game was left with many bugs unpatched. On a lark, I (and a few other fans) got together an reached out via E-mail to the publisher and offered to take a stab at the code and fix some bugs for free. To our shock they sent us the source code on CDROM. We never actually got very far (the source code was a colossal mess) but decades ago, wild shit like this probably happened more than you'd think.

I have no idea where those CDs ended up, probably tossed them at some point.

The early aughts were like the Wild West in game development. I remember almost taking a job with a smaller agency trying to build their own game engine and similar game to GTA but with a sci-fi twist.

Same thing. Company went under for a myriad of reasons. I should really write a blog post about it, some if was just so fantastical to believe. In the end, the devs scattered in all directions but my buddy took all the source code with him and tried to get a workable version going and release it on an independent label he started just for this game and project.

I ran into him a few years back and asked him about it and he said he still had the CD's laying around in his basement in storage. He said every few months, he would try and take a stab at it, but it was just too much for one person to handle and too many years had passed were it just wasn't worth it any more.

It would be interesting to see how many people had similar stories.

Is the source for the original 1995 version available? At a retro arcade it is the one game you can never play because there is always a line (harder to get a spot than Tron). I remember playing it on pc around 1997 also.

This is the 2005 game released on Xbox and PS2.

https://www.retrostic.com/roms/mame/area-51-41277

http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/dettaglio_mame.php?game_name=are...

Heh. That was one of the few games I could pump $20 into, hit start for both players and get most of the way through akimbo-style.

I tried it again later with House of the Dead 3. It didn't work as well. Harder to dual-wield shotguns.

The funny part is that the original arcade title, cabinet and kit, was probably the best selling Atari Jaguar title ever published.

The arcade hardware was CoJag, a version of Jaguar modified to run with a hard drive and have JAMMA-compatible signal output.

https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=778

So many questions...did the developer realize he was putting it up for sale? Did he just have a bin full of a bunch of old CDRs? How did the person rummaging even know what they came across? Presumably the buyer then took this to the developer to purchase. Did the developer know realize what he was selling?

Uploading the source code to GitHub no doubt constitutes copyright infringement.

I imagine GitHub will take it down if they're asked to, it seems rather clear-cut.

edit I see another comment pointing out this has been up for around 3 years now.

I think nobody cares yet (or will ever), though it is obviously infringement. If I buy someone's library in a garage sale, I do not automatically own the copyright to the books in it obviously.

Hopefully someone will write a source code review to explain how this all worked!

A find like this will get more interesting in the future when the artifacts are from the era of git. Imagine you find a single developer's git clone, and suddenly you have the full source history of the project.

Wonder how long until takedown notice (considering all the confidential files in that repo..!)

Probably a while, ownership is likely unclear, given the number of corporate transactions Midway has been through.

I thought Midway became WB Games when the Viacom family fucked up their financing.

Geez, these companies just keep getting passed around and around. I was working for Time Warner Interactive (aka Tengen, the consumer arm of Atari Games) when Midway bought them in '96.

The bigger question is if the company who legally owns the right to the code realizes it's their IP, and then, of course, if they care. Not every game publisher has a Nintendo-level concern for their archaic titles, and some publishing houses may own hundreds of franchises technically they have zero intent to ever touch again and may not even have bothered to keep track are theirs.

It's been up for three years now..

Needs a write-up about when, where, and how the media was found.

Every time someone finds "lost media", I always wonder how much media is lost to time because the wrong people went to the garage sale and did not know how rare a find was and it gets thrown away at the end of the sale.

Something I've seen personally is that family calls a cleaner/buyer in to sweep the home of a deceased relative and all is lost. In short, there is no rummage sale.

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