Since I’m playing the pedant in this thread: Activision put Zork 1/2/3, Beyond Zork, Zork Zero, and Planetfall up for sale on gog.com. Also Return to Zork, Zork Nemesis, and Zork Grand Inquisitor. They’re all still there.
[edit: and Steam, thanks for reminding me]
For general reference, the Zork Anthology (which also includes Planetfall) is available on GOG.com and Steam, and HHGG has an official free download on Douglas Adams’ website (linked on IFDB). But it’s true that Activision/Microsoft don’t currently offer most of the non-Zork catalog, although finding used copies on eBay is still feasible.
A cool comp idea: taking existing code of published games, changing only the text with no code alterations, and making something completely new. An Invasion of the Body Snatchers comp!
I would join that.
Sounds like the idea Melvin floated here!
In a world where IP law made sense, fanworks would be explicitly protected by the law, but as I understand it, they mostly fall into a legal gray area that’s never been tested in the courts because few publishers are big enough jerks to go after fanworks and no one who’s ever gotten a cease and desist letter has been foolhardy enough to risk going to court against a publisher that could bankrupt them many times over before the courts reach a decision(another place where legality and ethics diverge, court cases are often decided by who has the deeper pockets, not who is in the right).
Wasn’t aware the Zork anthology was a thing, though.
Changing the text of a game in this genre without changing the code does sound like an interesting restriction, especially since my intuition is that such would be more significant for an IF title than asset swaps are for a lot of video games
In a stroke of irony, that version of Planetfall used to have a bug that made you starve to death much faster than in the original. That’s been fixed now though.
I also took it upon myself to try and repair the pretty broken earlier version of Mini-Zork I and the almost finished Mini-Zork II.
They don’t seem to have put that much care into them, though. They’re using DOSBox, and the way they’ve set it up once when the games quit to DOS the window closes immediately. Which means you can miss some pretty important text.
I submitted a suggestion to GOG that they should add a “pause” to their “autoexec” script, but they thought this would be much too annoying to the player. Go figure.
Those modern ports are terrible, as are those photocopied feelies and manuals from the “lost treasures” releases. They certainly don’t reflect a lot of care for the source material.
Many moons ago, I played GOG’s version of the old DOS Star Wars X-Wing series and couldn’t launch the expansion content within the game. I went online, found a pirated copy of the game and discovered that they had a few missing files. I got their version to work with said files and emailed them about it. No response, but I got an automated reply (I think). You at least got a response.
I also suggested that nearest neighbour rendering for low-res DOS games looks better than anti-aliased and mentioned that the setting I used in the DOS Box config file wasn’t available in the visual Configuration App they package with their games. No response, but I did notice the option became available later. I want crisp pixels, sue me. (Edit: Sorry it was full screen (desktop res) with a 3x/4x ratio that looked best. It’s been many, many years, but the point still stands.)
I like that GOG exists (and DRM can go to hell), but they are a faceless corporation.
Last thing, I promise. When Cyberpunk 2077 was being developed (CD Projekt owns GOG), they reached out to the community and asked for a theme song of sorts for Cyberpunk. It was very weird, but it had a prize and I thought “that’s cool.” So I posted a suggestion of New Noise by Refused. It has a great electronic, punk, metal, rock vibe that I thought would work well with their game. I didn’t win, though I never expected to. Don’t know who did, but by a strange coincidence, Refused ended up being the main band to contribute songs to the Cyberpunk soundtrack as the “in-game” band called Samurai. I nailed that song, but no reply, even though they replied to others on their forums.
Fuck me. I honestly can’t make this shit up.
what was the timeframe of your mails to GOG ? between Witcher III (Roach’s antics…) and Cyberpunk, I understand that the GOG side of bug reporting got much lower priority…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
I’ll look up the emails tonight and report back. Let’s see if it aligns with your theory.
Surprised they bothered to make any of the Infocom games available through official sources, not at all surprised they half-arsed it.
The X-Wing thing was from June of 2018. I actually did get a response about how busy they were and that they’d look into it. (I totally forgot about that. I never did get a confirmation of any action taken.) I guess it was a response, even though it wasn’t very helpful. I wonder if this coincides with the time frame you were thinking of.
The DOSBox fullscreen config request thingy was back in June of 2015 and had no reply.
Is it weird that I think it weird Hal has saved e-mail conversations that are years old?
Well, most email clients archive old emails, and as long as he’s used the same client with the same e-mailbox, then it makes sense.
The only reason why I can’t do that is I’ve switched internet service providers and clients a few times, and didn’t bring my archive with me. Right before I moved to a new provider, my searchable email history was really something, though!
The email history on my desktop goes back around nine years. If I dug into my offline backups, I can probably find archives going back to around 2005.
But I might be a little weird.
I suppose plagiarism is probably the incorrect word here, but I was looking at it from a point of releasing a game without acknowledgement or the source from which it derived. Therefore, the assumption would be that the ‘work’ was solely from my hand and not from elsewhere. However, that would not be the case, so you are correct. I am gathering from the replies though that I should not worry about the legal implications (unless I get a cease and desist letter) and just treat any game (released or otherwise) as a piece of ‘fan based’ fiction and forget about it. I must say that looking at the zil code that infocom used and the derived code between games (different authors used amended code for the transit system) was quite interesting and tweaking it to make it work for me added to that. Thanks to everyone one who replied to this thread, again an interesting read that lead to some good responses. AG
Well, I’ve always used the web interface provided by my e-mail provider, but I generally delete the vast majority of e-mails I recieve within hours of recieving them, and every archived e-mail represents some kind of unfinished business. Of ~70 archived conversations in my Gmail, only 13 are over a year old, and only one is dated before 2021, and except for the oldest, all of those old conversations are related to my productivity as a amateur writer grinding to a halt over the last year or so when I wasn’t that consistent to begin with as they’re all related to writing commissions… and that 70 figure would be cut in half if Gmail let me merge conversations it failed to auto thread… I also keep my spam and trash cleaned out.
I’m pretty late to this convo, and I don’t know about the ethics. But my Milliways took the Infocom ‘release’ of it (so literally two or three rooms), and fixed up the parser (they obviously hadn’t tested it, because there were really a lot lot of bugs). And edited the stuff for the third object stuff. But I still did it. I haven’t been criticised for it (only for the game itself). So I know I might be using the wrong ethics here, but the transit system (a few hundred lines of code) is much smaller in comparison to the ten thousand lines of code in the new parser files (literally: last time I checked it was over 10,000).