[HN Gopher] Dead Games
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Dead Games
Author : LorenDB
Score : 93 points
Date : 2025-01-29 19:52 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (garry.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (garry.net)
| strongpigeon wrote:
| Website seems to have been hugged to death.
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20250129172837/https://garry.net/...
|
| Edit: Seems to be back.
| milesvp wrote:
| Presumably this is Garry Neuman of Garry's Mod fame. I love
| that he's looking to keep these assets from being lost.
| ryandrake wrote:
| It really is a shame that "failed" projects tend to just get
| tossed away rather than open sourced. The excuse is usually vague
| licensing reasons but, sadly, I bet the real mentality is "if
| I/we can't profit from my/our hard work, then nobody should enjoy
| it."
|
| I would love to adopt a few failed or semi-failed games from back
| in the 90s and resuscitate them to run on modern PCs. But the
| source code is likely lost.
| aaronblohowiak wrote:
| I think you are underselling licensing issues, especially of
| third party libraries I can imagine for things like ui, music,
| physics, etc.
| latedog wrote:
| I don't think the licensing is really the excuse. It is more of
| the fact that studios have put tons and tons of effort towards
| those assets including their creativity towards that partly
| finished end-goal. They most likely want to keep it in their
| possession if some point tides turn and they are able to finish
| the game or even small part of it.
|
| And I totally understand that. After sacrificing years and
| years + thousands/tens of thousands euros towards project, you
| really don't want to see it taken by other people and putting
| their own creative ideas on top of your work(that can be
| potentially used later).
| bombcar wrote:
| For the assets yes, especially. It's hard enough explaining
| to the Big Boss why the game your division worked on for X
| years is not going to release, but imagine having to explain
| the next year why some asset from it is all over YouTube.
| genocidicbunny wrote:
| Licensing is a huge issue. If the game is on consoles, that's a
| whole big chunk of code that has to be removed from the open
| source version. Console SDKs are usually under very heavy NDAs
| -- even indirect references to how the SDK works might get you
| into legal hot waters. Many middlewares, even for stuff like
| compression, are also usually under pretty punitive contracts.
| Older games had fewer of those problems, but practically
| speaking most well known releases in the last 25 years would
| have to have someone go through and sanitize the codebase, and
| that can be extremely time consuming. And depending on the
| specific game, stripping out all that stuff might leave behind
| just a useless skeleton of code because so many of the basic
| components that make up the game engine are third-party.
| Imagine getting access to a game's source code where the entire
| animation, loading, physics, rendering and many other small
| systems had been ripped out. You're usually not left with a
| whole lot of other stuff in those situations.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > The excuse is usually vague licensing reasons but, sadly, I
| bet the real mentality is "if I/we can't profit from my/our
| hard work, then nobody should enjoy it."
|
| I'm 100% certain that the primary reason boils down to "we
| don't have the rights to all of the source code, and we don't
| want to deal with any of the options for moving forward."
|
| As sibling comment points out, a lot of console SDKs are pretty
| heavy in the "this code must never be open-sourced" space
| (hell, even talking about what's in them can run afoul of
| NDAs). But it goes beyond that. Building assets might require a
| suite of proprietary tools and custom extensions for those
| tools, where your ability to release those extensions may be
| legally unsound. Many games will have several libraries, not
| all of them open source (and some of them probably under pretty
| strict don't-even-think-about-asking-us rules--can't imagine
| many anticheat or DRM packages are going to say yes to allowing
| source to be released).
|
| If the company doesn't have the rights to large chunks of the
| source code, their options boil down to:
|
| * Release just the bits they have the rights to, which isn't
| going to be compilable. And hope that nobody complains about
| residual references to their code in the released stuff
| (litigation risk!).
|
| * Spend time going through the code to sanitize references to
| unreleasable code, but still just release the not-working code
| drop.
|
| * Do the above, but also replace the unreleasable bits with
| working releasable bits.
|
| * Do nothing.
|
| One option involves no work and no risk. One option involves
| minimal work but incorporates small-to-medium risk, but also
| sacrifices much of the benefits of open-sourcing (there is
| likely to be community blowback if the product is unusable!).
| Two options involve a lot more work to mitigate the risk.
|
| It's going to be rare to find the corporation that's going to
| go for the no work/no risk route. If you want to change that,
| the best way is to create legal mechanisms to make the no work
| option much higher risk than the other options.
| bombcar wrote:
| The source code is likely not even terribly useful, for a game
| that was never released. What this is talking about are the
| assets (sounds, 3D models, textures, etc) which could still be
| quite useful.
|
| And that's why they don't just give them away (unless it's a
| very small studio/individual effort). Many "how it was made"
| histories of games describe how they used assets developed for
| a previous game or otherwise not used.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| If you're into "dead games" you might enjoy:
| https://www.gamesthatwerent.com
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| I wonder if dead games are the origin story of some of the asset
| packs being sold on itch.io
|
| https://itch.io/game-assets
| burgerrito wrote:
| Additional context: this is the creator of Garry's Mod
| bastardoperator wrote:
| His company also created Rust which ranks #8 on
| steamdb/mutliplayer games. They are currently in the process of
| making s&box on the source 2 engine. I'm just putting this out
| there, nobody works harder in gaming than Facepunch. Thank you
| Garry!
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| Man is one of my heroes. I grew up on the FP forum idolizing
| him
| ge96 wrote:
| I watch a streamer on YT who plays garbage games on steam and
| it's interesting wrt the game assets he's able to just call out
| what engine it was made with.
| mathnode wrote:
| While I definitely advocate for Ross Scott's effort behind
| https://www.stopkillinggames.com, there are still many titles I
| think that really don't qualify for the level of effort to keep
| them preserved. I am too old for Roblox, I have tried some
| Fortnite, but in my day _shakes stick_ , new ideas were expressed
| through some kind of mod. DOTA and CS are exceptional examples of
| this.
|
| Not every idea has the automatic inertia it needs to be the next
| big hit.
|
| I also speak as fan of games like Deceive Inc and First Class
| Trouble, I applaud Garry's effort in this case. The game engines
| and distribution platforms make it a lot easier to push your idea
| as a product instead of being just that, an idea.
| orf wrote:
| > new ideas were expressed through some kind of mod
|
| Roblox and Minecraft have exceptional modding scenes, eclipsing
| most previous generations by far?
|
| A Roblox modder created lethal company, a game that outsold
| call of duty. Minecraft modders are building literal computers
| inside the game.
|
| If we take modding as a pathway to learning engineering and
| programming, not only to producing games, then these are highly
| successful.
| mathnode wrote:
| Yes sorry perhaps a little more context helps for others that
| don't understand what we are talking about. Roblox and
| Fortnite are creative platforms as well as gaming platforms
| that rival if not excel the older modding tools because they
| make distribution so easy; good ideas flourish in these
| spaces. Lethal Company is a great example of a Roblox game
| mode(?) that excelled beyond the Roblox boundaries. I don't
| have the evidence at hand, but for anyone spending an
| afternoon in any modern game engine (UE, Unity, Godot) with
| their built in asset marketplaces and game templates, will
| see just how many games out there are just asset flips and
| not worthy of preservation.
|
| Assets and templates don't make a game. Ingenuity does, and
| folks...the current and next get game designers are using
| platforms like Roblox and Fortnite as their jumping off
| point.
| cobertos wrote:
| Wish it wasn't so rare to get good modding tools. From your
| examples, Valves commitment to their SDKs (for CS) and
| Warcraft's WorldEdit (DotA) are both nice ecosystems to work
| in.
| cschep wrote:
| It kinda feels like unreal engine and unity are the new
| baseline "games" -- but not games -- and the games are mods on
| top of all that existing machinery?
|
| Making a game used to mean writing an engine too and that just
| isn't true anymore it seems.
| mathnode wrote:
| Yes there are far too many asset flips and game templates
| that are just sold a individual games.
| pwatsonwailes wrote:
| Building an engine at the moment. 2 years in. Launching the
| game with it end of the year.
|
| Still a thing.
| offpath wrote:
| > I am too old for Roblox
|
| Roblox is a gaming platform. Popular among kids, yes, but
| that's like saying you're too old for Youtube. You can
| absolutely find a game with like-minded and older players.
| mathnode wrote:
| I would definitely appreciate the Roblox crowd making a play
| for older gamers, who can also code.
| cyberax wrote:
| App Stores (iOS, in particular) really made the problem worse. I
| have several games on iOS that are no longer playable (because of
| 32-bit removal) or even downloadable.
| Jordan-117 wrote:
| I've often wondered similarly for movies, especially CGI. So much
| time and money is spent to make complicated environments and
| intricate character models -- the end result gets preserved in
| the final cut, but what happens to the original assets? Do VFX
| studios typically maintain archives of past material, or does it
| all get wiped after each project? I'd think it would be handy to
| have for remasters, sequels, etc., even if they don't really care
| about preservation for preservation's sake. Physical props end up
| in museums or fetch a high price at auction from private
| collectors, but whither
| Avengers_Endgame_Thanos_final_final_FINAL.obj?
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(page generated 2025-01-29 23:00 UTC)