Play Sierra On-Line games in your browser (with added multiplayer)
sarien.net
sarien.net
I hope so too, but somehow I think his wish is not going to be granted...
http://www.amazon.com/VIVENDI-JEUX-PC-72465-Collection/dp/B0...
There is no "I really liked this when I was younger!" exception to copyright.
Under the laws before Disney began rewriting them, the copyright on many of my childhood nostalgia items would be expired, or close to it. Until 1909 the law was a 14 year period with an optional 14 year extension. Until 1976 the law was a 28 year copyright, with an optional 28 year extension.
Since 1976 the requirement in the US Constitution that copyright be "for limited terms" has been circumvented. Literally nothing new has entered the public domain, and much has been removed from it. I'm 40. Until last year there was literally nothing that had entered the public domain in my lifetime that had not been removed from it. Somewhere between now and 1923 I fully expect everything that has reentered the public domain in my lifetime to be removed from the public domain again.
People no longer have the experience of things entering the public domain. People have lost track of the understanding that there is supposed to be such a thing, let alone why it is important. I'm firmly in the minority that is both aware and thinks that it is a travesty.
It would be cool to explain explicitly why things should go in the public domain after X years instead of N years.
The principle embodied in the US Constitution is that the purpose of intellectual property is to maximize the development of the common public domain that we can all benefit from. Therefore copyright should have a long enough horizon to provide a sufficient incentive to encourage innovation, but should not be longer than that.
What fraction of the economic value of the average copyrightable work is captured in the first 30 years of its term? Most of it. In the first 70 years of its work? I saw an estimate of over 99% of it in one of the amicus briefs in the Eldred case. Therefore the real difference between current copyright law and perpetual ownership is less than 1% of possible value. That extra 1% is not material to people's decisions about whether to create new works, and therefore increasing the term of copyright further should lose compared to the economic value of having more material enter the public domain. (After the case was lost I saw Lessig mention that one of his mistakes was not pushing this line of economic argument more strongly.)
Anyways, given how the court ruled, this is a moral argument regarding future copyright laws and not a legal argument based on which one could overturn further bad laws.
Pay a fee and you have the right to distribute the [modified] games. And they can't say no.
It will break some models that rely on sales areas, but instead of take-down notices when someone violates copyright, you simply send a bill, with reasonable, non-punitive rates.
It needs some details to be worked out - in particular the rates, plus how to determine how many times the work was distributed. But those are solvable, and I think it would transform piracy from a problem, to a revenue source.
It would also help avoid all those messy areas where copyright rules cause real problems for people who just want to do something.
SierraGamers (http://www.sierragamers.com) is a lively forum maintained by Ken Williams, original founder of Sierra.
Quest Studios (http://www.queststudios.com) is a great site dedicated to the music of classic Sierra games, and also has a pretty good forum.
ImagiNation Revival (http://innrevival.googlepages.com) is a reimplementation of the ImagiNation service, which can be used with the original INN client (under DosBox with the serial port mapped to telnet).
And since this is Hacker News, The Ultimate AGI & SCI Web Site (http://agisci.classicgaming.gamespy.com) is a site dedicated to reverse engineering the old Sierra game engines. It's relatively old, but contains, among other things, IDEs for developing games that run under Sierra's AGI and SCI interpreters.
Old games are like legos, less sophistication = more imagination.
My nephew has several of these, but I think they're such a waste compared to the old days where you had a bucket of blocks, and you built whatever you wanted. I also have fond memories of Capsela, Constructs, and old Erector Sets.
I had the same experience playing Space Quest I as an 8-year-old kid with my friend. Except that it didn't occur to us to look up words in a dictionary; instead we kept calling an older friend who actually knew English and could tell us the magic incantations we needed to type to get somewhere in the game.
I'll never forget that you need to "fasten seatbelt" before launching the escape pod.
It could become very frustrating, especially as in those days you couldn't just go to web and find the walkthrough.
I remember being stuck on the top of volcano in Larry 2, trying to create a bomb to get inside:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QQRuRiPp6I#t=50s
Sometimes, the only option was to search through the game resource files, looking for strings that could be used.
Unfortunately, it appears that inventory disappears on restore from saved game, and there's also a lot that can be learned from the interpreter's command completion menu. A galaxy away from playing SQ1 on 5 1/4" floppies, but still: bravo! A noble effort, and I'm looking forward to playing with this some more.
The games from about 1989 onward, including QfG, used a different interpreter (SCI, which was very advanced for its time: an object-oriented VM platform with a complete GUI toolkit, running on top of vanilla DOS, years before Windows 3.0).
The SCI games can be played under ScummVM or DosBox, if you have the original binaries.
It is hard to find games in that same vein anymore. Planescape:Torment and KOTOR came close, but even those are several years old now.
If you haven't played it, I highly recommend "Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura", developed by Troika and published by Sierra in 2001. It's very similar in depth and mechanics to Torment, Fallout, and the other Black Isle RPGs.
http://www.infamous-adventures.com/index.php?page=projects
Still not QFG, I know, just an FYI.
The KQII remake (new animation/storyboard, new story, voice over pack) is probably one of my favorite games of all time.