DOS Games Discussion

[Guest]

Folks I hope you will forgive me gatecrashing the forum to come in here and try and draw some attention (and signatures) to a new Abandonware Petition.

To be honest I'm posting about this in as many forums as are likely to be interested, and having had a look through and finding some nice retro stuff I thought I could leave my mark here.

The Petition hopes to draw attention to the Abandonware issue, and maybe get the publishers to loosen their grip on copyright held on classic games of yester year. Yes, it's something of a long shot, but it's better than no shot at all.

An article here explains the thought behind the petition

www.exiled-gamers.co.uk/articles/abandonware/

and the petition itself is held here

www.petitiononline.com/oldgame/petition.html

Some people may think that old games aren't worth the trouble, they won't have the cutting edge graphics of modern games and may be difficult to get running. However the key to this is we'd like you to get a chance to see these games. To download them legally and get to see for yourself why they're considered classics. But unless the publishers release their death-grip on the copyright of games they never plan to publish again, you'll never get to make that decision yourself.

So do us both a favour. Read the article and if it makes sense to you sign the petition.

Could people also spread this around please.......the more people it reaches the larger the petition and the more chance it will have some effect.

Cheers

[The_Sinister_Mastermind]

Well I think the fact that we have a nice community going here and the fact that there are many others elsewhere proves that cutting edge graphics are not the be all and end all when it comes to gaming.

Also I think you'll find that many of the older gaming companies do quite often release many of their games as freeware, just look at Apogee. Ok yes I'd like more games to be released as freeware, but I'm more then happy to wait a little while.

Anyway, I'm going to move this over to the off-topic section as it really has nothing to do with finding old games.

[Dogbreath]

<Moved to General dosgames... hey, when was the name changed to General Gaming Talk?>

As much as I agree with you and support the legitimate abandonware movement wholeheartedly, I've never seen an online petition do anything useful. Ever. In all seriousness, please write the companies in question, post on their message boards, donate your money and extra time to sites that support older games (such as *cough* dosgames.com *cough*), but don't make an internet petition. That's just a big, tiresome, pointless way of getting ignored.

[ShoDan]

(Oooh... One quick and painless registration later)

You won't be surprised at the amount of times I've heard that, but the petition isn't the main part of the campaign, it's just a handy number that shows how many people have read and agreed with what has been written (unless they've read, agreed and then refused to sign as online petitions are worthless).

For the record, I have begun to attempt to contact people within the industry, but it's hard work; they don't tend to advertise the email address of the people you really need to speak too - this has also been posted on a few official forums; but once again, it's a matter of the people who need to see it looking at that forum.

The campaign has featured on Slashdot, Gamers Hell, AVault, [H]ardOCP and Moby Games; so it has had quite a bit of coverage already, I'm hoping that one of the big game sites will pick it up at some point - as they'd have much more influence and reach within the industry than I could ever dream of.


I'm not sure how donating my money to dosgames.com will help at this moment in time though

[Eugene Esterly III]

Well, I just signed the petition.

I like this campaign, I really hope that it works out because people want to play old games & the companies aren't even selling many of their older titles anymore.

[ShoDan]

Thanks for signing the petition!

I've recently been in contact with a few people who write for games magazines here in the UK, and amongst other things they suggested that instead of the original approach (something of an open-letter to the internet) that I should instead single out and attempt to chase down individual titles; which isn't a bad idea at all.

So, I set two games that I really wanted to play again, System Shock 2 and Alien Breed. It's very hard to get a response from anyone regarding SS2 - EA published the game, and don't reply to mere plebs emailing them; Looking Glass have since vanished, and Irrational have yet to get back to me (but weren't they recently bought by Take 2?) - so I'll have to keep on trying to contact anyone responsible for the game (Lead programmers, etc) as best I can.

Alien Breed, on the other hand, was simplicity itself - Team17 are still going and I managed to contact Martyn Brown regarding the campaign, he got back to me fairly instantly and had this to say:

[Eugene Esterly III]

[ShoDan]

The article itself actually lists some of the more popular titles that have been made available for free download, and also links to Liberated Games and World of Spectrum.

It's not a case of having games released for free, more a case of wanting older games to be still available for purchase (even if via a download) after their original retail life has expired.

True, this may not be possible for all games, but surely the bigger titles (such as System Shock 2, Syndicate, old Lucasarts point-and-clicks) would still be able to sell enough copies to justify making them available in this way?

[The_Sinister_Mastermind]

You still can purchase copies of Syndicate and many old LA PnC games off sites like Amazon and CD Access, not too sure about SS2 though.

[Eugene Esterly III]

[The_Sinister_Mastermind]

Well you have to think about it realistically, chances are most of the titles they could re-release they indeed would not make a profit on. The one’s that they would make a profit on, it wouldn’t be exactly a large profit. They have to ask themselves, ‘Is it worth the effort’? Unfortunate as it is, more often then not, no it’s not worth the effort. This sucks and is rather disappointing, but that’s life I’m afraid, you just have to live with it.

[ShoDan]

I've been getting a few more responses from within the Industry, for instance, Lidia from Ubisoft wrote the following:

[The_Sinister_Mastermind]

So basically they just told you what I said they were going to.

And seriously, if you want to go and make a proper business plan, be my guest. But, really, you're probably wasting your time.

You're better off just suggesting the online distribution thing. As no matter how good, or more then likely poor, your business plan is, it’s not going to be tailored to a business, so they’re not going to use it. Further, they have professionals who make such plans for a living, these people earn a very comfortable living doing so, do you really think they’d even take your business plan seriously? I’m not trying to sound harsh or anything, so please don’t take it that way, I’m just being realistic.

[ShoDan]

I do suggest the online distribution method when I email the companies, but I think the effort involved in setting something like this is up is still deemed to be too much of an investment of resources - hence why I wondered if someone with a business plan (with a plan for distribution and how much they would give back to the publisher for each game sold) would have anymore luck.

I'm not saying that they should produce an individual business plan for each company, but instead simply point out that they were intending to set-up a company with the premise of selling old games over the internet, would your company be interested in discussing the sale of your games in such a way - backed up with some further information (market research, etc) this would probably get much further than asking the developers to do it themselves.

[The_Sinister_Mastermind]

Well unless a business plan is tailored to that company, they're not even going to look at it, why would they bother? Each company is different and as such needs a different business plan, you can't just come up with and umbrella scheme for the to try and use, it just doesn't work that way.

What you went on to say sounds like a much better idea, simply proposing the idea to a relevant company and trying to show that there is infact a market out there, you’re much more likely to get somewhere. It’s sad, but at the end of the day, money does make the world go round, appeal to that, use that, it’s the only way you’re going to get any of these old titles available to the masses once more.