[HN Gopher] Source Code for Area 51 (2005) by Midway Studios Aus...
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Source Code for Area 51 (2005) by Midway Studios Austin Found at
Garage Sale
Author : andrew_rfc
Score : 115 points
Date : 2024-03-07 14:07 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| kloch wrote:
| Is the source for the original 1995 version available? At a retro
| arcade it is the one game you can never play because there is
| always a line (harder to get a spot than Tron). I remember
| playing it on pc around 1997 also.
| johnbellone wrote:
| This is the 2005 game released on Xbox and PS2.
| rolph wrote:
| https://www.retrostic.com/roms/mame/area-51-41277
|
| http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/dettaglio_mame.php?game_name=are...
| jstarfish wrote:
| Heh. That was one of the few games I could pump $20 into, hit
| start for both players and get most of the way through akimbo-
| style.
|
| I tried it again later with House of the Dead 3. It didn't work
| as well. Harder to dual-wield shotguns.
| joezydeco wrote:
| The funny part is that the original arcade title, cabinet and
| kit, was probably the best selling Atari Jaguar title ever
| published.
|
| The arcade hardware was CoJag, a version of Jaguar modified to
| run with a hard drive and have JAMMA-compatible signal output.
|
| https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=778
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Wow they built a whole game engine and editor just for this game,
| and they got David Duchovny and Marilyn Manson to voice act in
| it! And now it lives in obscurity
| myfavoritetings wrote:
| FWIW, most games before early 2000s built all their tooling
| from scratch as there wasn't off the shelf engines to use.
| Unreal engine came out in 98 and Source in 2004
| CalRobert wrote:
| I think some of the early FPS engines were re-used, with Rise
| of the Triad using the Wolfenstein 3d one.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| Engines that come to mind: XnGine (Daggerfall, Terminator,
| ...), Dark Engine (Thief, System Shock 2), Build (Duke 3D,
| Blood...). Yes, they existed before the 2000s, but the
| difference to today is that there were many engines being
| reused for a handful of games at most. Today it's few
| engines running most games.
| holoduke wrote:
| Battlefield, gta, alan wake, ms flightsim, cyberpunk,
| hogsward (unreal) all top games with different engines.
| Agree that unreal engine has many games, but plenty of
| alternatives
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| That's a pretty small selection of well-known AAA games.
| Those few examples really don't change the general skew
| towards using 3rd party engines these days vs. few games
| doing something like that in the 90s. And in fact, most
| of these engines have also been reused between games
| (with heavy modifications of course - e.g. Remedy's
| Northlight engine has been evolving since Alan Wake 1).
| holoduke wrote:
| Build engine duke nukem also used in many other games
| like blood etc. Same for quake engine. Even doom engine
| was used in games like hexen. Doom was also an evolution
| of the wolfenstein engine. Quake 1 to later quake engines
| all evolutions and used in a lot of other games. These
| are all 3d engines. On the nes, snes and sega machines
| the same platform engine was reused in 1000s of games.
| Same for sound engines, physics engines etc. My point is.
| I dont think there is a lot of difference. Innovation
| still happening today. Not everything is Unreal.
| Arrath wrote:
| Honestly it seems like it always has: there are a handful
| of dev houses using their own engine for a spread of
| games (e.g. EA with Frostbite, Ubi with Anvil, Rockstar
| with RAGE, Bungie with whatever they call the
| Halo/Destiny engine these days), then UE or Unity are out
| there mass licensed for a whole bunch of stuff, then the
| few less widely licensed engines like Source.
| treflop wrote:
| Wasn't Quake 1 reasonably off the shelf for its time?
| Released in '96, it did have a map editor and a number of
| games were built with it.
|
| Source itself being built from Quake 1...
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| idTech 2 was specifically built _for_ Quake 1, and only
| later it was licensed to other developers as well. So it
| was not an off-the shelf solution id could simply take for
| building Quake. It was tailored for that game.
| BikiniPrince wrote:
| They specifically built Quake to sell the engine. They
| knew it would be difficult to actually sell an engine
| without a successful title.
| franzb wrote:
| Interesting, I've never heard about that. Do you have a
| source?
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| Won't really work on consoles like PS1 and PS2.
| LarsDu88 wrote:
| Jedi Knight 2 came out in 2002 and the original Call of Duty
| came out in 2003, both running heavily modified versions of
| John Carmack's Quake III engine
| MisterTea wrote:
| id sold a few Doom and a bunch of Quake 1/2/3 licenses back
| in the day. Off the top of my head: Heretic and Hexen used
| the Doom engine, their sequels used the Quake and Quake 2
| engines respectively. Strife was an FPS RPG that was Doom
| based. Half-Life started out as a HEAVILY modified Quake
| engine and rumor has it that there is still a bit of Quake
| code in Source. Duke Nukem Forever started out on Quake
| before moving to Unreal.
| Keyframe wrote:
| id Tech engines, Renderware and a few other big ones were for
| sure available at the time and used. Earlier, during 90's was
| another situation however.
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| A lot of games did this.
|
| Like each Final Fantasy game on the PS2 is a new engine. Each
| Resident Evil.
|
| There was Renderware I guess to share liek Unreal. But that's
| it.
|
| Not like these new game devs. I can really tell these new games
| are so unoptimized.
|
| I mean look at this. Is this progress?? Not really. And 2024
| has just waaaaay worse performance.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5fr1R8kZzI
| jim90 wrote:
| Wonder how long until takedown notice (considering all the
| confidential files in that repo..!)
| toast0 wrote:
| Probably a while, ownership is likely unclear, given the number
| of corporate transactions Midway has been through.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I thought Midway became WB Games when the Viacom family
| fucked up their financing.
| gamacodre wrote:
| Geez, these companies just keep getting passed around and
| around. I was working for Time Warner Interactive (aka
| Tengen, the consumer arm of Atari Games) when Midway bought
| them in '96.
| edifus wrote:
| It's been up for three years now..
| skiman10 wrote:
| Every time someone finds "lost media", I always wonder how much
| media is lost to time because the wrong people went to the garage
| sale and did not know how rare a find was and it gets thrown away
| at the end of the sale.
| daniel_reetz wrote:
| Something I've seen personally is that family calls a
| cleaner/buyer in to sweep the home of a deceased relative and
| all is lost. In short, there is no rummage sale.
| bsimpson wrote:
| As you may have gathered from the list of home systems, this is
| not the light gun arcade shooter you remember from childhood. It
| appears to be a 2005 addition to that franchise.
| Arrath wrote:
| And it is, actually, a pretty decent game!
|
| Like the little-known console sequels to Far Cry, you later get
| infected with the gunk you're dealing with and it opens up the
| game a bit by adding extra abilities.
| sunnybeetroot wrote:
| Agreed, I remember getting it in an Xbox demo disk and
| playing the same level over and over again.
| accrual wrote:
| > It was found at a garage sale of a former THQ developer.
|
| This would be interesting to know more about. Was it on a CD, or
| maybe left on the disk of an old PC? I wonder how much old source
| code is hanging out in developer's attics and basements around
| the world, before git/online repos were a thing.
| ryandrake wrote:
| There's probably a lot lying around.
|
| Back in the early 2000s, or maybe late 1990s, I was a big fan
| of a PC game that ended up being a total commercial failure for
| the studio and publisher. It was so bad the studio went under,
| and the game was left with many bugs unpatched. On a lark, I
| (and a few other fans) got together an reached out via E-mail
| to the publisher and offered to take a stab at the code and fix
| some bugs for free. To our shock they sent us the source code
| on CDROM. We never actually got very far (the source code was a
| colossal mess) but decades ago, wild shit like this probably
| happened more than you'd think.
|
| I have no idea where those CDs ended up, probably tossed them
| at some point.
| fabiensanglard wrote:
| Hopefully someone will write a source code review to explain how
| this all worked!
| asveikau wrote:
| A find like this will get more interesting in the future when the
| artifacts are from the era of git. Imagine you find a single
| developer's git clone, and suddenly you have the full source
| history of the project.
| mattw2121 wrote:
| So many questions...did the developer realize he was putting it
| up for sale? Did he just have a bin full of a bunch of old CDRs?
| How did the person rummaging even know what they came across?
| Presumably the buyer then took this to the developer to purchase.
| Did the developer know realize what he was selling?
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Uploading the source code to GitHub no doubt constitutes
| copyright infringement.
|
| I imagine GitHub will take it down if they're asked to, it seems
| rather clear-cut.
|
| _edit_ I see another comment pointing out this has been up for
| around 3 years now.
| withinrafael wrote:
| Andrew initially had a rough disassembly-only dump of the retail
| Area 51 on GitHub in a (quickly abandoned) attempt to remaster
| it. He must have gotten lucky here, or maybe more likely a
| previous developer tossed him a (very nice) bone.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > or maybe more likely a previous developer tossed him a (very
| nice) bone.
|
| This is what I am thinking. It seems a long shot the source
| code was simply discovered at a garage sale by chance. Too much
| coincidence that a. the THQ dev still had the code just kicking
| around and b. a computer savvy person happened upon this garage
| sale, buys said artifact and discovers the code. Stars must
| have been aligned.
|
| I think the THQ dev likely knew the "buyer" or someone put them
| in touch and the cover story is "oops, I accidentally sold the
| source at a garage sale" in case lawyers get involved.
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(page generated 2024-03-07 23:00 UTC)