And if so, what tactics did they use? Pester the devs? Crowdfunding to buy the rights to the game from the devs? Something else?
Edit: I’m more looking for instances of the actual original game being open-sourced through fan efforts or outright purchase, like how Blender was originally open-sourced as a result of a crowdfunding campaign. The open-source rewrites of games are awesome, but I don’t have the skills to build a relatively elaborate game on my own. It’s also not a popular game, more niche, really, so I’m just wondering what are the possibilities.
[email protected] was developed as a commercial title a few years back. I believe, @[email protected] contacted the devs to get it open-sourced.
Yes. :) Well, the source code was actually supposed to be released under the BSD-3 license even back in 2016, after the game was abandoned in its commercial form in late 2014. But the plans fell through and when the official community site (with discussion forums, wiki as well as sharing levels for the game) then shut down in 2018 without a word from the original author, it was assumed that the open source release would never happen anymore.
I had played the game when it originally released in 2013 (and I had also played the prequel from 2011), so my time with the game goes back for a long time. When I came back to the game after a year or two of inactivity in late 2019 I discovered the sorry state that the game was in, and decided to begin reverse engineering the game to create a new unofficial community site for it (I have a longer blog post that goes over it in some more detail, up to and including after the source release). During this time, the original author was more or less impossible to get into contact with, but one day in August of 2022 he just stumbled into the unofficial Discord server we had for the game and got to see the stuff I had done. He was very happy to see what I had accomplished to try to revive the game on my own, and after he had reintroduced himself to what remained of the community and we had talked for a while, the topic of releasing the source code was brought up. Which of course he was very enthusiastic about.
In the end I didn’t end up actually being the one who published the source code to the Internet and such, but I was definitively the one who got the ball rolling again and at least I got to be the first one to build it natively for Linux, among other things. And when the original author had to leave again for personal reasons I was given the maintainer hat in his absence to keep the open source project running in the hands of the community. Apart from the fact that there did not end up being a lot of momentum for the development of the game afterwards (whether it be due to the release happening so many years late that people moved on, the unfortunate state that the game’s source code ended up being in, or personal incompetence on my part), Principia has probably been among the best success stories of an abandoned commercial game in modern times being open sourced and officially picked up by the community, and it also likely had the best circumstances to make it happen.
Neat, thanks for the response!
I think, we have to tag @[email protected] , so they see it.
Awesome, thank you @[email protected] for those details and @[email protected] for the tag!
Not quite the same, but Total Annihilation and Beyond All Reason. It wasn’t abandonware, but more like after Total Annihilation hit success, rights were sold and resold and Atari as the final owner squandered every opportunity to do more with the engine and the franchise.
The tactics were essentially receating a better engine with Spring, as the sort of newly open source upgraded version of the engine the same people built 10 years earlier. Taylor Swift did the same thing.
Not strictly the same, but one of the most amazing feats to me in this topic was done by the Sacred community over at DarkMatters.
Apoligies for the wall of text, but I consider it worth a read.
Sacred 2 in particular never had its server code open sourced, leaked, or anything of the like as the studio went bankrupt before anything could happen, this was around 2010.
Over the course of a decade a few volunteer devs would pick up a project where using tools like wireshark etc they’d essentially sniff traffic sent by a client attempting connection to a server that didn’t exist, and using this, devs would literally try to GUESS what a server would respond, and what a client expected, essentially trying to build out the backend infrastructure from SCRATCH.
Fast forward to 2020 or so and progress was still being made, not only that but things were beginning to actually take shape. In 2021 (IIRC) one dev in particular had the general frame of a working server and continued to work on it. Fast-forward and since 2022-23, you’re able to run both a LOBBY for multiple servers and an actual GAME SERVER yourself, self-hosted and code is open.
I’ve ran a couple servers using docker since, where I played with friends, and being able to replay that childhood game, with friends, one I thought I’d never be able to share the experience for, is a dream come true.
Another neat thing is that it was reverse-engineered in windows, but the docker containers literally run WINE to translate windows calls to Linux and it just works.
Knowing I’m able to in 2,5,10,30 years pick this up, and not only that, but replay with friends means this work of art has a great chance at preservation.
If you’re into power metal, there’s a band called Blind Guardian, they not only did they the main theme for the game, but the band’s members have an entire quest-line in-game that culminates with an in-game concert. Again, a work of art worth preserving, and now, it can be shared.
Awesome achievement, thanks for telling the story!
The developer of Terraria promised to open source the canceled sequel if a petition could get enough signatures but then it did and he didn’t release the code
Plenty of devs think it’s easier than it is. A ton of games are built on proprietary tools, and then you get into legal hot water on whether you can even give away things like the soundtrack or assets you bought like stock sound effects.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they looked at it after the petition and thought “wait, I actually can’t open source this”
I totally get that, but if that was the reason maybe he could have explained it? Maybe he did? I don’t know.
Ur-Quan Masters (aka. Star Control 2)
But, it’s not really abandoned anymore. The developers are FINALLY making an official sequel!
The sequel is not open source, but UQM/SC2 is.
This happened in the early 2000s, but I think they found the source code to a port of the game and said “We haven’t earned any money from sales of this game in a decade [and buying digital games wasn’t really a thing yet, as people generally believed that anything digital shouldn’t have a price], so let’s release this to the community to open source as long as they do all the reverse porting and support!”
