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Comment by thristian | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure this site will be taken offline for copyright infringement almost immediately, but it really is a decent recreation of the original. It's also historically significant: Dune II is to the real-time strategy genre what Wolfenstein 3D is to the first-person-shooter: not necessary the very first example ever, but the first to achieve notable popularity, and the progenitor of most of the following examples.

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No copyright issues; it's based off of OpenDUNE: http://www.opendune.org/

The source-code is probably based off OpenDUNE but I'm pretty sure the art isn't. They'll be taken down for the art for sure ...

Dune 2 was released as freeware if memory serves me right. I know they still can send them C&D letter, but I don't think westwood/ea will bother.

Yep, looks like they just recreated the game engine. You still need a copy of the original Dune 2 data files to play the game.

Haters gonna hate.

As far as I can tell from their wiki, OpenDUNE was created by disassembling the original game and recoding the assembly in C. I wouldn't say the copyright issue is clear-cut, here.

And thank god for the original C&C. I still think the soundtrack was brilliant: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZAaq5JIhW0

I was always partial to Red Alert: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb-gI_pFog0

Rapidly heading off on a tangent, but there was an AMA by the creator of the RA soundtrack on Reddit[1] quite recently. I had no idea Hell March was that well-known (and I finally found out what the correct lyric[s] was!)

[1] http://www.reddit.com/comments/11n1xk/c6o41e1/

Except they're not the real lyrics. For some reason, even the composer believe is German, when is an Spanish commander guiding his troops in a march.

For me, it's also the predecessor to tower defense games.

This took a moment to sink in but that's quite exactly how I played it (and Dune 2000) back in the day. Way before I even knew Tower Defense games :-)

Ah, I miss those long windy trails of concrete and rocket turrets built right at their base :)

Also the first game I learned to 'hack', and it's what set me on the path to learning programming: I discovered a hex file editor on a floppy and had a hunch about how things might fit together.

So I saved a game, waited a second until some money was spent in the game and then saved again into a different slot. Thereafter I went through the two save game files, visually figured out which parts were different between the files, changed the magical numbers I saw, reloaded the game and slowly figured out how to make myself rich :)

(This worked much better than my earlier attempt with the disk editor I found where I thought I was really clever compressing files by changing their size to 0.)

Yea I remember that! Was it a utility or something off a bbs? I remember a hex editor!

Indeed, and I often came up with solutions that looked like Vauban star forts[0]. I also remember having a hard time in a C&C3 mission (where you raid the Nod temple), whose defense is tiered similarly.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_fort

Maybe a silly question: do copyrights for games (art or whatever) ever expire?

I believe this would be the correct copyright term for a game made by a game company.(every body who made it works for the game company so it should all fall under work for hire). Instead of the usual death + 70.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries%27_copyright_...

95 years from publication or 120 years from creation whichever is shorter (anonymous works, pseudonymous works, or works made for hire, published since 1978)

Yes, but not for a long time.

By "long time" you mean "as long as large copyright holders lobby to keep extending the window" which could mean "never" in practice.

Why don't we just settle on "so long as to make expiry irrelevant for video games".

I don't know what you're complaining about. Pong will be public domain in 2092.

Same as for anything. In the United States there's a chart for looking up rights and determining if a property has reverted to the public domain: http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm

1923 is the base-line year for any works with a proper copyright notice. 1977 for any works at all, as the requirement for a notice or registration was eliminated.

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