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Not all games have permission to be archived. Nobody here on Hacker News or the Internet seems to care about copyright of old DOS Video Games and permission to

Not all games have permission to be archived. Nobody here on Hacker News or the Internet seems to care about copyright of old DOS Video Games and permission to download and play them. It is like they are being given free candy, and they enjoy it, even if technically it was stolen. But there is a DMCA takedown page that copyright holders can request their games be taken down. I figure some of the video game makers that have games on Steam and Gog.com will issue takedown requests. Enjoy it while you can. The Underdogs did an DOS video game abandonware archive 10 years ago and had to take games down as well. We are all into this playing old games on modern systems craze, so much that we don't really care about copyright and permissions anymore. The Internet Archive is a non-profit and claims to use the library defense. The Pirate Bay once did this as well, but it didn't work. Some games like Prince of Persia got released to the public so no permission problems there. BTW some of the games are really porn, beware if you got your sons and daughters looking into the old DOS games.

dalke 12y ago
A lot of the material on archive.org doesn't have permission to be archived. They did not seek out each copyright holder of GeoCities when they made their archive, available from https://archive.org/web/geocities.php https://archive.org/web/geocities.php . Are you going to say that that was stolen? Or was it saved? And, sorry to break this to you, but we never really cared about copyright and permissions in the first place. Look at the uproar over TRAC when Mooers couldn't get copyright for it at all, so tried to enforce trademark protection over it. Look at the Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists in the 1970s. Look at the sheer joy of people using the original Napster in 1999. The games industry of the 1970s and early 1980s didn't even really pay attention to trademarks, which is how we ended up with the classic BASIC game "Star Trek".
- orionblastar 12y ago
  I wrote some things, I had a few Geocities web pages, I worked on some DOS Games, I wrote some games in Commodore 64 BASIC, I helped make text files for a community college BBS in 1989. All of which got used without my permission. I never saw one penny for such things. But I see how it works now, I don't own my own works, and they are free to be copied and put on display for others to use for free. In the early 1970's and 1980's there was still a 'fair use' clause in copyright. For non-commercial use, for educational use, for parody/satire, etc. The DMCA changed that so after 1999 copyright law and IP law was more strict. That is why you could have a game in BASIC named Star Trek and not have Paramount care that you did. That is why there were several versions of the old BBS game Tradewars, originally written in BASIC for a TRS-80, and then converted to IBM BASICA, and then in Turbo Pascal, and then Tradewars 2002. Because all of that was done before the DMCA passed. I can tell by the downvotes that the community here does not care about permission and encourages the copying and saving of older material as some sort of library. Stuff I worked on as side projects way back in the day, appear to be part of Archive.org and other sites. Yet nobody cares. Will the side projects people write today get copied and saved in the same way? Will all of the time we spend on working on side projects go to support some archive site?
michaelbuddy 12y ago
Lots of those abandonware games are open now. Atari released source code to some classics publicly years back. And they still show up as paid games on devices occasionally because public domain open source is like that. When you say nobody cares you act like there are these starving video game artists who would be able to afford bread if only WE cared a little bit and bought the games. Bought them where? And to play on what? Most of us reading and interested in this are of the age who not only cared but already bought the games. We paid their salary with first-run purchases and pumping in the quarters. Then the systems eventually stopped working and we no longer had options because we were just dumb average consumers we couldn't rebuild our systems. But we paid a lot of salaries back in the day didn't we? A lot of old games were homebrew but the vast majority of games that people know of were through publishers. The devs made money out of the gate as employees or through publisher contracts. Publishers survived a while, or didn't, merged, squandered, were bought etc etc. After everything now, how much do the creators stand to gain if the games can't be played? Even somebody with the biggest heart isn't gonna "care" about a dissolved publisher of a game, when nobody on staff at the new name corp even had anything to do with the game back then. Yeah there's money in nostalgia but it doesn't go to creators. Even if suddenly a movie was made about some classic game, it's not like suddenly the game creators are gonna get a massive revival of players or royalties. Most of them have no contract to earn royalties. Not our fault. The game would have to be re-released on a new platform, recoded, made better and you'd be looking at the new developers making the money on appstore sales. Most people in the tech community know how broken copyright and patents are. And when a system is broken (like how copyright and patents mostly don't encourage advancement or creativity. Especially if nobody pops up with legitimate claims on works. Now if somebody's grandson does a reddit AMA about grandpa who designed and developed River Raid and is down on his luck, that's hustle and that's gonna be people reaching out to that person because they want to, not because they are owed back royalties. An original game developer now is better off kickstarting plans to buy the IP back whatever 10th company owns it now, and selling logo licensing through Hot Topic. Old games are historically interesting and valuable but no longer for the masses who spend money. I can buy a game on steam any winter or summer that had 100 devs working for 3 years to finish it paying less than what I paid for Atari cartridges back in the day. And that game may last me 30 hours of play. If anyone deserves to make any remaining profit off the games, it's the original designers and devs. But they're gonna have to hustle like everyone else in the entertainment biz to make money off their work. Find a way into the comic cons as speakers or autograph signings, start new companies, reach out to old fans, find new fans. The magic here, the things us classic players care about is that the games play. And archive.org made that happen. If anyone's helping these old devs, it's archive.org. because you need an emulator to play them. If they become popular again, people standing in line, I think the game devs if they did stand to profit from revival might consider paying a percentage the tireless emulator developers for breathing new life into their work.

dalke 12y ago

A lot of the material on archive.org doesn't have permission to be archived. They did not seek out each copyright holder of GeoCities when they made their archive, available from https://archive.org/web/geocities.php https://archive.org/web/geocities.php . Are you going to say that that was stolen? Or was it saved? And, sorry to break this to you, but we never really cared about copyright and permissions in the first place. Look at the uproar over TRAC when Mooers couldn't get copyright for it at all, so tried to enforce trademark protection over it. Look at the Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists in the 1970s. Look at the sheer joy of people using the original Napster in 1999. The games industry of the 1970s and early 1980s didn't even really pay attention to trademarks, which is how we ended up with the classic BASIC game "Star Trek".

orionblastar 12y ago
I wrote some things, I had a few Geocities web pages, I worked on some DOS Games, I wrote some games in Commodore 64 BASIC, I helped make text files for a community college BBS in 1989. All of which got used without my permission. I never saw one penny for such things. But I see how it works now, I don't own my own works, and they are free to be copied and put on display for others to use for free. In the early 1970's and 1980's there was still a 'fair use' clause in copyright. For non-commercial use, for educational use, for parody/satire, etc. The DMCA changed that so after 1999 copyright law and IP law was more strict. That is why you could have a game in BASIC named Star Trek and not have Paramount care that you did. That is why there were several versions of the old BBS game Tradewars, originally written in BASIC for a TRS-80, and then converted to IBM BASICA, and then in Turbo Pascal, and then Tradewars 2002. Because all of that was done before the DMCA passed. I can tell by the downvotes that the community here does not care about permission and encourages the copying and saving of older material as some sort of library. Stuff I worked on as side projects way back in the day, appear to be part of Archive.org and other sites. Yet nobody cares. Will the side projects people write today get copied and saved in the same way? Will all of the time we spend on working on side projects go to support some archive site?

michaelbuddy 12y ago

Lots of those abandonware games are open now. Atari released source code to some classics publicly years back. And they still show up as paid games on devices occasionally because public domain open source is like that. When you say nobody cares you act like there are these starving video game artists who would be able to afford bread if only WE cared a little bit and bought the games. Bought them where? And to play on what? Most of us reading and interested in this are of the age who not only cared but already bought the games. We paid their salary with first-run purchases and pumping in the quarters. Then the systems eventually stopped working and we no longer had options because we were just dumb average consumers we couldn't rebuild our systems. But we paid a lot of salaries back in the day didn't we? A lot of old games were homebrew but the vast majority of games that people know of were through publishers. The devs made money out of the gate as employees or through publisher contracts. Publishers survived a while, or didn't, merged, squandered, were bought etc etc. After everything now, how much do the creators stand to gain if the games can't be played? Even somebody with the biggest heart isn't gonna "care" about a dissolved publisher of a game, when nobody on staff at the new name corp even had anything to do with the game back then. Yeah there's money in nostalgia but it doesn't go to creators. Even if suddenly a movie was made about some classic game, it's not like suddenly the game creators are gonna get a massive revival of players or royalties. Most of them have no contract to earn royalties. Not our fault. The game would have to be re-released on a new platform, recoded, made better and you'd be looking at the new developers making the money on appstore sales. Most people in the tech community know how broken copyright and patents are. And when a system is broken (like how copyright and patents mostly don't encourage advancement or creativity. Especially if nobody pops up with legitimate claims on works. Now if somebody's grandson does a reddit AMA about grandpa who designed and developed River Raid and is down on his luck, that's hustle and that's gonna be people reaching out to that person because they want to, not because they are owed back royalties. An original game developer now is better off kickstarting plans to buy the IP back whatever 10th company owns it now, and selling logo licensing through Hot Topic. Old games are historically interesting and valuable but no longer for the masses who spend money. I can buy a game on steam any winter or summer that had 100 devs working for 3 years to finish it paying less than what I paid for Atari cartridges back in the day. And that game may last me 30 hours of play. If anyone deserves to make any remaining profit off the games, it's the original designers and devs. But they're gonna have to hustle like everyone else in the entertainment biz to make money off their work. Find a way into the comic cons as speakers or autograph signings, start new companies, reach out to old fans, find new fans. The magic here, the things us classic players care about is that the games play. And archive.org made that happen. If anyone's helping these old devs, it's archive.org. because you need an emulator to play them. If they become popular again, people standing in line, I think the game devs if they did stand to profit from revival might consider paying a percentage the tireless emulator developers for breathing new life into their work.