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The classics

Started by King of Men Aug 14, 2006 at 5:16 PM 5 replies 900+ views

Original Post

126

Aug 14, 2006 at 5:16 PM

There are some games that are remembered even a decade after their graphics have become obsolete; that can still be played and enjoyed on computers that can run their once CPU-choking engines as a background process. Civilisation, Thief, Europa Universalis II, The Magic Candle, Monkey Island - the classics of their genres. A lot of them are listed in the Game Design forum under 'games all designers should play'. That's a useful approach; we can all learn from the greats. But I'd like to consider something different : How are we going to be playing these games in the future? There's only so much you can do with emulators, and it'll always be a fairly specialised market, for the savvy connoisseur. Can we preserve these gems, then? Might it be possible for a company to make money by packaging a lot of classics in one box, together with the emulators, slowdowns, or other hacks, to make them just work? (Or if there's no money in it, perhaps it could be done by an open source community?)

DogCity

Aug 14, 2006 at 6:32 PM

Trust in capitalism and the classics will keep coming back. Again, and again and again.

Example: xbox live arcade.

OrangyTang

335

OrangyTang

Aug 14, 2006 at 6:45 PM

Quote:
Original post by King of Men
Might it be possible for a company to make money by packaging a lot of classics in one box, together with the emulators, slowdowns, or other hacks, to make them just work?

Er, did you even do any research before posting this? Theres been a whole flood of re-releases lately, stuff like Namco collection, Gradius Portable, the Taito collection and numerous classic games on Live Arcade (pacman, galaxian, frogger, street fighter, joust, robotron, smash tv). Sega have been releasing old Sonic and megadrive games in collections for a few years now (and more recently, some Sega CD games). Theres a remake of Ghouls and Ghosts for the PSP sometime soon and probably lots I've already forgotten about. All available on console so they "just work".

And I havn't even mentioned the 'virtual console' stuff that Nintendo have been hinting at with the Wii either...

Extrarius

234

Extrarius

Aug 14, 2006 at 6:48 PM

A better way would be to find who has the rights to them, contact each one and buy the source, then port the games to a universal game engine of some kind (one for FPS, one for RTS, etc) that could be easily updated over the years so that the core game still runs and with it, all the (converted) data files allow the various games to still be played.
A kind of "it's not an emulator, it's a virtual machine" approach =-)

King of Men

Author

126

King of Men

Aug 14, 2006 at 7:09 PM

Quote:
Original post by OrangyTang
Quote:
Original post by King of Men
Might it be possible for a company to make money by packaging a lot of classics in one box, together with the emulators, slowdowns, or other hacks, to make them just work?

Er, did you even do any research before posting this? Theres been a whole flood of re-releases lately, stuff like (list of games played by lower life-forms)

Research before posting in the Lounge? What are you smoking? But apart from that, if I had done any research, it certainly wouldn't have been on (shudder) console games. If you'll take a deeper look at my post, I referred only to the true classics, that is, PC games.

Trust in capitalism and the classics will keep coming back. Again, and again and again.]/quote]

Well, that's sort of the question I was asking; can we actually trust in capitalism? Is there any money in restoring old games to playability? I don't think it's obvious.

Quote:
A better way would be to find who has the rights to them, contact each one and buy the source, then port the games to a universal game engine of some kind (one for FPS, one for RTS, etc) that could be easily updated over the years so that the core game still runs and with it, all the (converted) data files allow the various games to still be played.
A kind of "it's not an emulator, it's a virtual machine" approach =-)

That's an interesting approach, but has two difficulties; first, you'd also need the content, which might or might not be available. Second, porting is always going to be a non-trivial task; programmer time isn't cheap, so that might cut rather deeply into your profit margin. Not a bad idea, though; you wouldn't have to make your own virtual machine, even, you could just use Java.

GreenToad

Aug 14, 2006 at 7:17 PM

Quote:
Original post by Extrarius
A better way would be to find who has the rights to them, contact each one and buy the source, then port the games to a universal game engine of some kind (one for FPS, one for RTS, etc) that could be easily updated over the years so that the core game still runs and with it, all the (converted) data files allow the various games to still be played.
A kind of "it's not an emulator, it's a virtual machine" approach =-)

This is an absolutely terrible idea. The amount of energy required to write these "generic" engines to work with any number of these old games and also getting them to run and feel right would be enormous. Especially if you wanted to play games from other platforms in addition to just the PC classics. Not to mention that buying the rights and source to these games would be another huge undertaking on its own and likely impossible.

Writing emulators to run the old games and having their original creators port them to new systems would be and is a far better choice than writing a bizarre abstraction layer between the old games' game code and this hypothetical generic engine's code.

shuma-gorath

Aug 14, 2006 at 10:51 PM

If think back a few months, you may recall hearing that the LOC is in the process of archiving old games in an attempt to "preserve digital materials." Additionally, along the same lines as Tangy's post, the tube's constantly reminding us about GameTap.

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