Jan. 13th, 2005

xiphias: (Default)
One of the other reasons I haven't been updating my LJ much recently is that I've been spending my free time with a new computer game. Well, an old one, actually.

"Abandonware" is one of those grey areas of copyright. But it's a fairly light shade of grey. It refers to software which is technically under copyright, but the copyright holder no longer exists, and nobody actually CARES about the software, except the people who want the software. There's a website, Home of the Underdogs, which archives abandonware and allows for it to be downloaded. They only put up software if they've got good reason to believe that nobody owns it, and, if they find out differently, they take it off their site, and replace their download link with a link to the actual copyright holder. So I consider them good folks.

Anyway, there was this DOS CRPG from 1992 called Darklands. It's a great game that did terribly in the marketplace (that's the main purpose of "Home of the Underdogs" -- to showcase the underdogs), mainly because the first release was so buggy to be unplayable. The version they've got on the site is Version 7, which is when they finally got everything ironed out, but, by that time, it was too late, and Microprose killed the entire division which had produced the game, and which was the copyright holder. Microprose then sold the distribution rights to a fansite, and the fansite went under, which is how The Underdogs got it.

Let this be a lesson to all you software developers out there: it doesn't matter how good a product is -- if it's too buggy to use, it's no good! Because this is a damn fine CRPG.
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