The legal situation is a mess too. We're not competing with anyone (game's been dead over a decade), we're not selling anything, but we still operate in this gray area wondering what's fair use versus what crosses a line. Copyright law wasn't written with "what if the company abandons it and erases it from existence" in mind.
Meanwhile every day that passes, more of these games just vanish permanently because preservation is treated as piracy.
It makes me very angry to realize that the same people who decided to completely destroy that game still get to obstruct and/or receive benefits from any third-party effort for 61 more years.
...do they?
Like let's say I make a modified version of this game. Technically my modification is illegal to distribute since it contains assets I don't own the rights to. However, the creators of the original game don't own the rights to my modifications either.
I hope the corporation has moved on and doesn't bother you. And if they do, we'll remember. I'll never forgive EA for C&Ding the attempts to revive Battlefield 2. Just one of their many atrocities.
"around 75% of original silent-era films have perished ... Of the American sound films made from 1927 to 1950, an estimated half have been lost"
Mainly it's down to the materials technology of the time, and the fact that cellulose was need for war purposes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_MGM_vault_fire
(That article says that many other film studios destroyed old film prints, so it's not just fires (explosions really, since nitrocellulose film tends to go boom, plus even in the best case it degrades into an unusable mess with time))
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_literary_work
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_media
Several lost games from the text-adventure world are listed here:
https://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/~ajo/in-search-of-LONG0751/2009-...
https://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/2923 (BlackDragon and Dor Sageth)
https://web.archive.org/web/20140528184628/http://games.wwco... (The PITS)
https://bluerenga.blog/2024/09/02/adventures-1974-1982-lost-...
https://bluerenga.blog/2024/10/27/adventures-1974-1982-lost-...
(To be fair, many of the games listed in the latter two posts seem to be known only via advertisements; it's conceivable that those advertised games might never have existed. But in many cases we know a game existed because we have testimony from people who played it at the time.)
https://lostpixellore.com/blog/where-in-the-world-is-static-...
There was guy/robot, viewed from above, going along a path, and an input -- tape with blue and red dots. Player task is to create the path with tiles like "if the current tape dot is red -- turn left, otherwise turn right", and "write blue to the tape".
Advanced levels had interesting tasks like "imagine the tape represents a binary number, add 1 to it".
gxd•3mo ago
Humanity has done a decent job at preserving artifacts from our past despite wars and the effects of time on our cultural output. Throughout history, books, paintings, sculptures, music, and other forms of art were the available outlets for artistic and creative people. With the rise of computers, video games joined the set of cultural works produced by our species. While one could argue that the artistic value of David and Pac-Man is not comparable, I prefer to adopt a more open-minded view of games. It's great that some people are giving video games proper attention, considering the enormous amount of time we spend playing them and the place they occupy in our childhood memories.
reddalo•3mo ago
Timwi•3mo ago
gxd•3mo ago
That said, unfinished games are similar to manuscripts of an unfinished book. Many such manuscripts have been published throughout history and are, in my opinion, part of our cultural heritage too.