Games That Weren't: Preserving Cancelled and Unreleased Video Game History | Hacker News Reader

Games That Weren't: Preserving Cancelled and Unreleased Video Game History

gamesthatwerent.com

96 pointsibobev24 comments

And to be able to preserve released Video Games, please go support the Stop Killing Games [1] movement and sign the European Citizen's initiative [2] if you're an EU citizen. There is 1 month left to bring the subject to a discussion, and 500k signatures are missing.

[1] https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

[2] https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home

I think all art and media should be preserved. It's been clear for decades current copyright laws aren't fit for purpose. Fair use within books is for collection so it should be for digital.

What do copyright laws (which, don't get me wrong, have a whole kettle of issues for sure) have to do with this?

DRM is just a thing that authors choose to put into their media. The fact that they do it because enforcing copyright via legal channels is unrealistic is effectively incidental.

If anything, what is necessary to achieve the objective is putting limits on what authors are allowed to put inside of the media they are producing, which is a heck of a can of worms in of itself that I think zealous preservation advocates are a bit too eager to brush off.

Maybe I don't grasp the full picture, but the amount of patent trolls and media companies constantly attacking the Internet Archive should be enough to empirically prove that our current laws do a terrible job at ensuring media is preserved.

While the legality of data preservation/sharing is a whole can of worms in itself, Stop Killing Games would at least address the technical hurdles of even being able to run the game after its end of life.

With always-on-DRMs, server-based multiplayer service games, and even things like exclusive streaming-only video games, even having access to the data required to run what you purchased can be literally impossible.

Yup, signed the initiative.

They allow companies a legal right to attack those who host for archival purposes. This makes it hard for people such as the internet archive to carry on. Archiving and collecting digital works of art and therefore the code behind it, should have the same as physical works.

DRM is a whole different kettle of fish that I agree also needs to be solved with all media forms.

> What do copyright laws [...] have to do with [...] DRM

Ask the people who signed off on DMCA/EUCD.

> I think all art and media should be preserved

Completely agree with you, and so does Ross Scott, the principal proponent of the Stop Killing Games movement.

Unfortunately "Video Games are art" is still too controversial of a take so the focus is currently on the customer protection angle, as the road for this argument is already paved by existing EU legislature.

That's true, but IIRC Stop Killing Games goes a bit further and aims for things like the release of server code when the servers get shut down.

Not necessarily source code, but anything that would keep the game in a playable state after end of life. So any one of:

- a) patch to game the game playable in single-player mode locally

- b) binaries to self-host a server

would satisfy that requirement.

Note that the details of implementations of any law that would advance the cause are still to be discussed, which is the whole point of the petition.

More on what would be expected and some example use-cases are available in the FAQ of the Stop Killing Games official web-page: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq

The grail:

https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/parasol-stars/

Still hoping we might find something of it in the future. Though Colin binned all his personal disks about 10 years ago.

We were grateful though to recover our other holy grail: https://www.gamesthatwerent.com/gtw64/daffy-duck/

There's another due in the next few weeks with any luck :)

I worked for Ocean Software France at this moment. Ocean Software stopped all development on Amiga and Atari ST, so there were a few games that we working on that were never released. They wanted to focus on licenses, so all the other games were ditched

Hi there, thankfully Snow Bros and Liquid Kids were recovered in recent years.

Do you by any chance know anything about these two titles which are still at large? Guerilla War and Adidas Golden Shoe?

Not sure if i'm allowed to keep posting links here.

Yes, I programmed Snow Bros for the Atari ST. It was finished but never released. And no, I have no copy either. When I worked for Cryo, I coded a game "Trashman" for the SNES. I still have a copy of the game but it's not finished.

Sorry to hear that. I suspect that you've been asked that question a lot too about still having it by the Atari community! :) . Hopefully something will surface in the future via other means.

That sounds very interesting about Trashman and would love to learn more sometime if you were up for talking about the game? If so, please feel free to contact me via the contact form link on the website.

>> Upon travelling to Ocean to explain the situation, Colin produced the 3 month demo again and stated that he’d be able to get the game back within short time. Sadly Ocean didn’t want to see it through any longer...

That's unfortunate as the second version likely would have been written much faster and have fewer lines of code.

If I read the link correctly, this is incredibly the third version. The first version was lost in the burglary, the second version was destroyed by a vengeful ex-wife so the three month demo you quoted was the second re-write.

I have one that I worked on: Lunatik for Playstation 1 - This was a game I worked on in 1996/7 that ended up being cancelled by EIDOS after two years+ of effort. We had major problems trying to make this into a 3D Defender and that is why it mostly was canned.

[1] My github with a 'playable' early demo: https://github.com/louthy/lunatik-psx

[2] Video of the gameplay from the demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4UcxKkC14o

[3] Write-up by unseen64.net: https://www.unseen64.net/2020/11/16/lunatik-pure-entertainme...

[4] My comment on unseen64.net about what happened: https://www.unseen64.net/2020/11/16/lunatik-pure-entertainme...

Very cool. I wonder if these get picked up and completed eventually by some enthusiastic coders.

I collected a pair of disk images of games of my own "that weren't". I should (maybe this Fall) gather sources to create volume 3 ("The Color Games"). (I was posting them chronologically, starting with the B&W games, and kind of ran out of steam when I got to the color games. Fall seems to the the time of the year when I pursue these indoor projects that look backward.)

I also received permission to post sources for a pair of games that I co-worked-on with a friend in the U.K. — games that also were not. I should get that together this Fall too and push to The 'Hub.

https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/SoftDorothy-UnfinishedTa...

Just seen your email! I'll certainly arrange to add an entry for the site to document them and thank you for saving yours and your friend's work.

I love the B&W Mac artwork as well. Will try and reply sometime this afternoon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Fantasy_Live_Online this is probably the one I still think about the most. I was huge into Phantasy Star Online and a true console MMO was so appealing at the time.

See also: unseen64.net, which has been running since 2001 (hence the '64' in the title, as a relic from the N64 days).

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