And if so, what tactics did they use? Pester the devs? Crowdfunding to buy the rights to the game from the devs? Something else?
Edit: I’m more looking for instances of the actual original game being open-sourced through fan efforts or outright purchase, like how Blender was originally open-sourced as a result of a crowdfunding campaign. The open-source rewrites of games are awesome, but I don’t have the skills to build a relatively elaborate game on my own. It’s also not a popular game, more niche, really, so I’m just wondering what are the possibilities.
As I understand it, something like that happened with the game, Alliance. It was a RTS where humans had to control all the units that the commander build and ordered around.
I learned about this, probably 15 years ago, and I never played, so a lot of this might be outdated or just plain wrong.
I think Microsoft published the game, and eventually abandoned it. It still had a thriving mod community but they were struggling due to the lack of source code and support. Apparently, years after working on the game, one of the designers happened across an Internet forum talking about the struggles they were having. The designer then went back to his bosses and said, “We abandoned this years ago, can I just give them the source code?” I guess they did and since then the mod started making HUGE fundamental changes to the game.
Magewars had a brief revival
Early Dooms and Quakes https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM but they aren’t open source for the reasons you wanted.
No problem, thanks!
Freespace 2 comes to mind. The whole game engine was open source not just the game itself. Looks like there is still a community building on it too. https://scp.indiegames.us/
Hawken was recently brought back from the dead by a few insanely dedicated fans.
Thanks! What did they do?
Mechromancy, I guess. I genuinely don’t really know.
No worries, I’ll check it out, thanks!
Club Penguin Rewritten, Toontown Rewritten, and The Legend of Pirates Online (based on Pirates of the Caribbean Online) are resurrected fan-made versions of games shut down by Disney. The former was also shut down by Disney, but the others are still going. I think the difference is that the Club Penguin revival included ads while the other two were never monetized at all.
Cool, thank you!
Does the Unity release of Daggerfall count?
What’s the story with that one? Was the original game open-sourced, or is it a rewrite?
Edit: never mind, I just saw the other reply that it was reverse engineered.
Not at all. The reverse engineering they had to do is insane
[email protected] was developed as a commercial title a few years back. I believe, @[email protected] contacted the devs to get it open-sourced.
Cool, thank you for the reference! If I decide to pursue something like this, I will know someone to ask questions to.
Does rewriting the game count? https://2009scape.org/
The server is a rewrite from scratch and the client is a decompiled and deobfuscated binary from January 2009
oh wow, uh, my IP is blocked from accessing that website
Must be in the UK
Yeah, but… why?
Legal reasons, Jagex being a UK company
Thanks! Not quite. The idea I have in mind is to avoid having to rewrite it, if possible. Besides, I don’t think I’d have the wherewithal to do it.
Ur-Quan Masters (aka. Star Control 2)
But, it’s not really abandoned anymore. The developers are FINALLY making an official sequel!
The sequel is not open source, but UQM/SC2 is.
This happened in the early 2000s, but I think they found the source code to a port of the game and said “We haven’t earned any money from sales of this game in a decade [and buying digital games wasn’t really a thing yet, as people generally believed that anything digital shouldn’t have a price], so let’s release this to the community to open source as long as they do all the reverse porting and support!”
Thank you!
This was my favorite game as a kid. Doing fan-art and a D&D campaign about it for years got me hired on as an artist for the new one! It’s gonna be wild.
Congrats!! As I’m sure you can imagine, I am incredibly excited for COI!
One that I’m aware of is Re-Volt. The source code for both the base game and some addons can be found here.
There was another one that I remember using years ago but I can’t find it anymore. It was for another racing game called 4x4 Evo. There is the 4x4 Evolution Revival project but it’s not the one I used and there doesn’t seem to be any source code available.
holy shit, very cool to learn about re-volt! i loved playing that game with my brother on n64
Thank you!
Star Wars Galaxies.
Thank you!
The history of city of heroes might interest you.
Thank you!
Came here to point out CoH!
Warzone 2100 is an RTS that fans petitioned a company to release as FLOSS, after support had ended.
Thank you!
And it’s fun. I still play it when I have time.
While not open source, OldUnreal has taken over Unreal and Unreal Tournament with access to the source code and they release patches. The OldUnreal team has an agreement with Epic to do this.
Good to know, thanks!
Any idea how that happened?
Not for sure exactly, maybe there are some details on the forums?
That’s awesome. I had no idea.
