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Comment by applfanboysbgon | Hacker News Reader

> Because the market keeps demonstrating that these technically simpler but vague requirement tasks have a lot more value than something like game dev, at least monetarily.

Game industry generates hundreds of billions in revenue. There is plenty of value in it. The value happens to not be in decompiling 80s/90s games you have no legal right to sell, of course.

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There is more value in remastering old games than you might think. And there always has been. One of my first gigs in the game industry was producing an Infocom Clasics CD-ROM at Activision. That’s games from the seventies and eighties re-released in the nineties.

Was it an issue that Infocom had been shut down? For example for making a version of the Z-Machine for Windows 95 or whatever was current. Did Activision have an archive of all the Infocom development stuff, or were you able to go off of whatever documentation fans had come up with when they were making unofficial Z-Machine interpreters?

Activision bought Infocom. We did have an archive of the Infocom servers which was kind of amazing. I remember notes for an adventure game set on the Titanic. There was a design document for Leather Goddesses of Phobos II.

That's interesting, thanks for sharing!

And I was very happy to purchase BOTH volumes, as a long-time Infocom fan! I still have the discs in storage in a box of old cds in my closet. Of course, now I just have the z-machine files on my computer and run them through Gargoyle...

If you have the rights to sell them, yes.

Once you change the artwork and branding, why is there no legal right to sell? Your defense against cloning are trademark, patent, copyright and trade secret. And the lawyers and money to enforce it and the courts to agree. And if the AI does it, rather than you feeding it copyrighted or trademarked assets, then did you violate copyright or trademark law or did the AI company or does this no longer make sense in a post AI world? The article touches on how current AI services launder copyright and trademark in the 'choose one' section.

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