[game_preservation] Open Sourcing MMO's that have "died"

[Andrew Armstrong]

People have setup fake servers without the source code before. Or 
they've got a leaked old version and still got it to work, who knows? 
Some servers got shut down (EQ ones?) by someone I recall.

For a competent coder it'd probably not take too much effort to sort it 
into a workable state, and the developers would also, obviously, have 
copies of the game or code which can access the world sans players, sans 
server, for debugging and testing (or at least, a version which requires 
no big authentication server, etc.)

The technical problems are therefore nil. I'd say it is more a 
philosophical one - if they want to release it totally open (as the 
article I posted suggests) there are reasons why Id do that for their 
games and others don't - as the article says. But the other option like 
I mentioned is to dark archive or private archive it, so select 
archivists and historians can access the game but the source code is 
kept under wraps.

Hell, even just the game server files and no source code, most companies 
would balk at. The effort, the time and the money involved, even before 
the possible need to keep it for IP rights or if they want to reuse it 
in the future or fear people will use it for bad things, are what put 
them off.

But then again I've not talked to anyone at these companies about this! 
Henry is obviously doing that front, it'll be nice to see what comes out 
of the virtual worlds project, especially if some better way of getting 
the assets archived is achieved.

Andrew

Captain Commando wrote:

> Regarding getting the server to run, you could probably just set up a 

> fake server and run the whole thing off of there. This would require 

> getting inside the black box of the game, though, and I doubt there 

> would be many companies willing to take that risk, even if the program 

> is good and dead (what's to stop them from worrying about whether or 

> not somebody will steal everything and set up a rogue server?). I know 

> that these things can be faked, considering how Warp Pipe managed to 

> get the Gamecube running over LAN for things like Mario Kart. I should 

> think working with a virtual world would be somewhat more complex, but 

> still analogous.