8 ms·

Source Code for Area 51 (2005) by Midway Studios Austin Found at Garage Sale

203 points by andrew_rfc 3y ago

mynameisnoone 3y ago
Needs a write-up about when, where, and how the media was found.
kloch 3y ago
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 3y ago
  This is the 2005 game released on Xbox and PS2.
- rolph 3y ago
  https://www.retrostic.com/roms/mame/area-51-41277 https://www.retrostic.com/roms/mame/area-51-41277 http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/dettaglio_mame.php?game_name=area51&search_id= http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/dettaglio_mame.php?game_name=are...
- jstarfish 3y ago
  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 3y ago
  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 https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=778
LarsDu88 3y ago
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
- rkagerer 3y ago
  X-Com Files on OpenXcom is my latest favorite retro Android game.
- myfavoritetings 3y ago
  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
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    That's not quite true. There were plenty of 90s game engines. They just weren't as general purpose. So you would end up rewriting a good chunk anyways to get what you wanted.
    - happymellon 3y ago
      They managed to do this to Quake. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SGknUiihpkI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SGknUiihpkI
  - masfoobar 3y ago
    There were game engines in the 90s -- Quake Engine, Build Engine, Unreal Engine.. to name some of the popular ones. You also had GoldSrc, a modified Quake Engine for Half-Life 1. Many companies created their own and was not available outside the business. Dark Engine used in the Thief:Dark Project games is an example. Think of companies like Nintendo having their own engine which powered games like Mario 64 and, I believe, Ocarina of Time was a modified version of that. The "off the shelf" engines available at that time (like Unreal or Quake engine) might have been decent for certain type of games. Today, you could say many games could be done with Unity, Godot, or Unreal. There are still companies today using their own.
jim90 3y ago
Wonder how long until takedown notice (considering all the confidential files in that repo..!)
- toast0 3y ago
  Probably a while, ownership is likely unclear, given the number of corporate transactions Midway has been through.
  - bsimpson 3y ago
    I thought Midway became WB Games when the Viacom family fucked up their financing.
    - gamacodre 3y ago
      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.
    - ocdtrekkie 3y ago
      The bigger question is if the company who legally owns the right to the code realizes it's their IP, and then, of course, if they care. Not every game publisher has a Nintendo-level concern for their archaic titles, and some publishing houses may own hundreds of franchises technically they have zero intent to ever touch again and may not even have bothered to keep track are theirs.
- edifus 3y ago
  It's been up for three years now..
skiman10 3y ago
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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- daniel_reetz 3y ago
  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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  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 3y ago
    Agreed, I remember getting it in an Xbox demo disk and playing the same level over and over again.
  - cosmojg 3y ago
    Just like the better-known sequels to Jak and Daxter!
  - ablation 3y ago
    You mean the Crysis series? With no doubt tens of millions of sales[1] by this point in time and AAA marketing budgets, I’m not so sure they’re little-known. Apologies if you’re referring to something else of course. 1: https://www.vgchartz.com/game/226218/crysis/ https://www.vgchartz.com/game/226218/crysis/
    - jayGlow 3y ago
      I think he was referring to the Xbox far cry sequels far cry instinct and far cry evolution. seems they really are not well known.
      - Arrath 3y ago
        Yeah, those.
accrual 3y ago
> 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 3y ago
  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.
  - burningChrome 3y ago
    The early aughts were like the Wild West in game development. I remember almost taking a job with a smaller agency trying to build their own game engine and similar game to GTA but with a sci-fi twist. Same thing. Company went under for a myriad of reasons. I should really write a blog post about it, some if was just so fantastical to believe. In the end, the devs scattered in all directions but my buddy took all the source code with him and tried to get a workable version going and release it on an independent label he started just for this game and project. I ran into him a few years back and asked him about it and he said he still had the CD's laying around in his basement in storage. He said every few months, he would try and take a stab at it, but it was just too much for one person to handle and too many years had passed were it just wasn't worth it any more. It would be interesting to see how many people had similar stories.
fabiensanglard 3y ago
Hopefully someone will write a source code review to explain how this all worked!
asveikau 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 3y ago
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.
- dkarras 3y ago
  I think nobody cares yet (or will ever), though it is obviously infringement. If I buy someone's library in a garage sale, I do not automatically own the copyright to the books in it obviously.
withinrafael 3y ago
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 3y ago
  > 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.
  - westhanover 3y ago
    I like this thinking. It could trigger the discovery of a bunch of cool stuff at garage sales.
tonetheman 3y ago
[dead]

203 points by andrew_rfc 3y ago

Needs a write-up about when, where, and how the media was found.

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 3y ago
This is the 2005 game released on Xbox and PS2.
rolph 3y ago
https://www.retrostic.com/roms/mame/area-51-41277 https://www.retrostic.com/roms/mame/area-51-41277 http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/dettaglio_mame.php?game_name=area51&search_id= http://adb.arcadeitalia.net/dettaglio_mame.php?game_name=are...
jstarfish 3y ago
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 3y ago
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 https://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=778

LarsDu88 3y ago

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

rkagerer 3y ago
X-Com Files on OpenXcom is my latest favorite retro Android game.
myfavoritetings 3y ago
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
- deaddodo 3y ago
  That's not quite true. There were plenty of 90s game engines. They just weren't as general purpose. So you would end up rewriting a good chunk anyways to get what you wanted.
  - happymellon 3y ago
    They managed to do this to Quake. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SGknUiihpkI https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SGknUiihpkI
- masfoobar 3y ago
  There were game engines in the 90s -- Quake Engine, Build Engine, Unreal Engine.. to name some of the popular ones. You also had GoldSrc, a modified Quake Engine for Half-Life 1. Many companies created their own and was not available outside the business. Dark Engine used in the Thief:Dark Project games is an example. Think of companies like Nintendo having their own engine which powered games like Mario 64 and, I believe, Ocarina of Time was a modified version of that. The "off the shelf" engines available at that time (like Unreal or Quake engine) might have been decent for certain type of games. Today, you could say many games could be done with Unity, Godot, or Unreal. There are still companies today using their own.

jim90 3y ago

Wonder how long until takedown notice (considering all the confidential files in that repo..!)

toast0 3y ago
Probably a while, ownership is likely unclear, given the number of corporate transactions Midway has been through.
- bsimpson 3y ago
  I thought Midway became WB Games when the Viacom family fucked up their financing.
  - gamacodre 3y ago
    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.
  - ocdtrekkie 3y ago
    The bigger question is if the company who legally owns the right to the code realizes it's their IP, and then, of course, if they care. Not every game publisher has a Nintendo-level concern for their archaic titles, and some publishing houses may own hundreds of franchises technically they have zero intent to ever touch again and may not even have bothered to keep track are theirs.
edifus 3y ago
It's been up for three years now..

skiman10 3y ago

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.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
daniel_reetz 3y ago
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 3y ago

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 3y ago
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 3y ago
  Agreed, I remember getting it in an Xbox demo disk and playing the same level over and over again.
- cosmojg 3y ago
  Just like the better-known sequels to Jak and Daxter!
- ablation 3y ago
  You mean the Crysis series? With no doubt tens of millions of sales[1] by this point in time and AAA marketing budgets, I’m not so sure they’re little-known. Apologies if you’re referring to something else of course. 1: https://www.vgchartz.com/game/226218/crysis/ https://www.vgchartz.com/game/226218/crysis/
  - jayGlow 3y ago
    I think he was referring to the Xbox far cry sequels far cry instinct and far cry evolution. seems they really are not well known.
    - Arrath 3y ago
      Yeah, those.

accrual 3y ago

> 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 3y ago
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.
- burningChrome 3y ago
  The early aughts were like the Wild West in game development. I remember almost taking a job with a smaller agency trying to build their own game engine and similar game to GTA but with a sci-fi twist. Same thing. Company went under for a myriad of reasons. I should really write a blog post about it, some if was just so fantastical to believe. In the end, the devs scattered in all directions but my buddy took all the source code with him and tried to get a workable version going and release it on an independent label he started just for this game and project. I ran into him a few years back and asked him about it and he said he still had the CD's laying around in his basement in storage. He said every few months, he would try and take a stab at it, but it was just too much for one person to handle and too many years had passed were it just wasn't worth it any more. It would be interesting to see how many people had similar stories.

fabiensanglard 3y ago

Hopefully someone will write a source code review to explain how this all worked!

asveikau 3y ago

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 3y ago

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 3y ago

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.

dkarras 3y ago
I think nobody cares yet (or will ever), though it is obviously infringement. If I buy someone's library in a garage sale, I do not automatically own the copyright to the books in it obviously.

withinrafael 3y ago

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 3y ago
> 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.
- westhanover 3y ago
  I like this thinking. It could trigger the discovery of a bunch of cool stuff at garage sales.

tonetheman 3y ago

[dead]