Lost Infocom Games Discovered 112
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Archivists at Waxy.org have gotten a copy of the backup of Infocom's shared network drive from 1989 and are piecing together information about games that were never released. In particular, there is the sequel to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy called Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and there are two playable prototypes of it. And yes, they have playable downloads available."
Infocom was never the same (Score:2, Insightful)
hard drive archeology (Score:4, Insightful)
Nostalgia! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nostalgia! (Score:4, Insightful)
Its just not the same without the props... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just don't! (Score:2, Insightful)
He shouldn't have done that (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, he probably shouldn't have published the code and game files, either. Those data are not his. He has no right to do with it as he sees fit. Someone "gave" that drive to him, but that may not have been theirs to give. Truthfully, I have less of a problem with that, as no one likely really cares about the games themselves. But, its still an issue.
At any rate, I think he's hiding behind "journalism" to simply publish some juicy talk associated with a formerly popular defunct games publisher.
Re:Here's an idea (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Educational value: (Score:5, Insightful)
get some of the infocom guys to talk abou this (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, email is NOT that hard.
Re:Educational value: (Score:5, Insightful)
Riiiight... Because this doesn't make a perfect example of why such information can do the world good, long after a company has ceased to exist as a viable market presence.
You might want to gloss that bit over in class. "Remember, protect everything, because your company will always sit at the top of the niche-X market, will never go bankrupt, and no one will ever care about your work long after the fact".
Personally, I consider the rarity of amazing find like this, further proof of the absurdity of existing copyright law. Copyright exists to grant a limited monopoly on creative works, rather than making them vanish into obscurity (deliberately, as with the BBC's pre-1970 archive purge, or not, as with all nitrate and acetate film ever made).
We need copyright to expire early enough that society can preseve both the released form and any historically-interesting raw materials (ie, source code). Not only that, I would go further, to say that we need to require the eventual release of such raw materials, for the grant of copyright in the first place.
Re:He shouldn't have done that (Score:3, Insightful)
You can argue legalities, and expectations of privacy *with the benefit of hindsight*, but at the time it probably would have been reasonable to assume that these emails would not have been published in public; for professional reasons if nothing else.
Re:And now writing the games is a game... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think Inform 7 comes way too close to falling into an "uncanny valley" of natural language.
Traditional structured computer languages have the advantage of being distinctly unlike other languages, so they're a separate learning path. This makes them easy to identify, and easy to 'switch gears' mentally into, with the downside that multiple languages mean more to learn.
When you're this close to natural language, the distinctive and necessary bits are pretty subtle, and the chance for confusion is much higher, IMO. At this point, you're not learning a language so much as a new dialect.
Re:And now writing the games is a game... (Score:3, Insightful)