This is pretty fricking amazing! Like most Indians of that generation, I got my first personal computer in 1985~86, with a preloaded pirated copy of Windows 3.1, pirated copy of Autocad, pirated copy of Prince of Persia, pirated copy of QBasic, pirated copy of COBOL, CLIPPER, a pirated database dBaseIII, another pirated database FoxBase, a pirated spreadsheet called Lotus 1-2-3, a pirated wordprocessing thingy called Wordperfect, and several other pirated goodies. I figure in today's environment that's enough to keep me behind bars for a million years :) But in those days, there was no other way to buy a PC. You bought a PC & you got all that pirated stuff, like it or not. So Prince of Persia was like THE game that everybody in India played at that point in time.
My first 1000+ LOC program was a Qbasic routine to draw a pumping heart saying "I love you" mostly using PUTPIXEL(..) :) After laboring over that pumping heart dot qbas program, I finally worked up the courage on Valentine's Day to show it to this girl who I thought would fall in love with me after seeing it. Instead, she ran away & told her mom I was a freak messing with "the electronic compoooter" , so her mom got her married off to a proper MBA. She had me send "electronic mail" as email was called those days, to her rich friends using an AOL account.
I updated it a couple weeks ago and (hopefully) fixed many of the Firefox compatibility issues that plagued my initial launch back in October. It might take a while to load, but once the music is playing and the film strips are scrolling, it should be ready.
I've brought it up here before, but I really like the fact that (large) pixel art is still appreciated and produced. Coming from the inventiveness of the ZX Spectrum days I had a genuine sense of loss when SVGA and "photo-realistic" graphics turned up in the late 80s/early 90s.
It wasn't that some 256 colour demo in a computer shop wasn't impressive, they blew my tiny litle mind - it was more that I saw a pattern of "Some day people will be looking at photos and videos on these screens as if they were TV!" - abhorrent idea at the time to someone who liked a memory mapped display. It was as if the intricately crafted, detailed pixel art I had grown to love would become obsolete.
These days I'm less of a stickler and look forward to owning a high colour depth "retina" 28" monitor to use vim on, but I'll never stop pining for the days when a pixel could be seen from across the room on a 14" TV with blurry RF.
Anyway, I believe this counts as rambling... tl;dr, this game looks ace and plays really well, performance is great. Great work!
This is why I am glad to be a web developer, seeing things like this done in the browser without using Flash makes me excited for the future. A spot on HTML5 version of the game, super fun and impressive. Can't wait to see more being added to this by the author.
Wish we could see stats on how far people ran before suspecting that's all there was, and how many ran a bit further strongly suspecting but "just in case."
HTML5 does that still mean in messaging terms it's a web app or app created using html5 & then converted into a mobile app? Previously it was the latter, but now I wonder are others confused when they see "X Game - HTML5"?
This may just be me sounding like a broken record here, but if anything this page makes me more upset than the last similar page being linked on the author's website.
This person is using the IP of other, living individuals, without their permission, explicitly in order to promote his own book and consulting services, for profit. He previously did it with Command and Conquer and now he is doing it with Prince of Persia. While in the case of C&C you could say 'it's EA, who cares', Jordan Mechner is a hard working, brilliant individual who has poured his life and soul into advancing the state of the art in game design, and arguably in storytelling as well. It offends me to see his work treated with this degree of disrespect.
To be clear, I don't think there's anything wrong with messing around and trying to recreate the look and feel of the old PoP. Even if it's technically illegal, the use of the original sprites doesn't bug me. What bugs me is the shameless use of the work for personal gain without even the slightest hint of respect for the original author.
In both cases you could also easily make the argument that these are active IPs that have been used in the recent past, and that the games ported could easily be a source of profit for the original creators (or the current license holders). A Prince of Persia game and movie were released as recently as 2010, and a Command and Conquer product was released in 2012.
I don't want to be disrespectful, but honestly i cant see why this would upset you, even it it were a complete clone of the original Prince of Persia.
Is there any way to run the original PoP on the web, or even buy it? If there's not, then i don't see how this work could negatively affect the PoP creators. On the contrary, it works as a tribute; it's not mocking the original PoP or something like that.
And, to be completely honest, i find it quite absurd that someone would want to make money from something he worked on more than 20 years ago while most people have to work daily to get paid.
It doesn't matter if it's hard to find the original PoP on the web. If the point was to make a piece of abandonware accessible to the public (and I question the assumption that PoP is abandonware), then you'd do that, not make a lazy clone of the game and put ads on it.
I think hosting abandonware is fine but it's totally not acceptable to try and make money from it. It's not your product to monetize, even if it's 20 years old.
You do not get it, the author abused an IP, or to put it in correct terms, he raped her and told us she likes it (then asked us to buy the book on how to rape). You must agree that rape is a highly upsetting subject and should not be supported in any form by anyone. Personally, I've been severely upset by recent examples of sexual violence like the one against Jane Austen, namely "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies", for which its author would be hanged in any civilized nation, but in our happy-go-lucky country of rapist pirates, monsters like Seth Grahame-Smith are allowed not only to remain at large, but also to profit from their crimes.
IPs are fragile and special creatures and nobody but the original author can be said to know what an IP needs in order to thrive, because an IP is nothing less than a private part of the author's mind. Of course, sometimes the author themselves takes the IP in a direction that's completely counter to their original birth-concept (e.g. Dune, The Wheel of Time) - such cases of self-rape must be recognized by mental institutions as what they are - schizophrenia, and those people put away, preferably for life.
In conclusion, we need tougher, much tougher IP laws, in order to protect our minors from rape by pirates. Think of the children!
It's not like he's selling Prince of Persia or Command and Conquer t-shirts, or a book on how to rip off games and make money doing so, he's selling expertise on creating game engines, and using retro games to demonstrate the effectiveness of the techniques. He's doing this out of a love for the games in question, evidenced by the faithfulness of reproduction. What you're describing is something like Evony or Zynga, where they rip off other games wholesale and pretend it's original.
There is a reason why practically every indie engine under the sun has the ability to load e.g. Quake models. It's an easy source of well-crafted content. Programmer art is a surefire way to kill interest in a project.
? It's a demo with only one room.
A 3D printing of the Eiffel tower isn't a "shameless use" of the work of Mr. Eiffel, but a demostration of the technology.
In the same way, the "product" here is not PoP but how to make games with JavaScript.
Exactly. It's easier/quicker to mock something up using existing assets, like this HTML5 version of Klax (http://tinyurl.com/html5-klax) I made to test out ImpactJS.
That's all well and good, and it's also a point I made in my original post. Where's the line, though? Is it okay to steal from Klax's authors because it came out in 1989, or because Atari isn't around anymore, or because Klax isn't for sale anymore, or because you're not explicitly charging money for it?
It's one thing to use someone else's art in a 'remix' fashion, where you use it in an early prototype to get the feel of things, or you're building a riff on an existing game that makes it different in some new or interesting way.
You certainly won't find what the original author is doing described on the wiki page for Fair Use [1], and sadly that doesn't apply to your use of Klax either.
I don't think your little HTML5 port of Klax makes you a bad person, but you should re-evaluate whether it really makes sense to have a 'software consultancy' link right above material that - no matter what you say to justify it - does not belong to you.
You did the hard work to build a playable Klax clone: Great! Now, how about you go out there and find someone to replace the art so it's legal? I'd bet there are plenty of Klax fans out there; I follow some of them on Twitter. If your goal is to promote your for-profit software consultancy, how about you spend some of those profits on making your HTML5 game legit? It's not actually that expensive.
When I was last building a for-profit title on my own, I definitely used some existing assets in early prototypes. You can find footage of them in the archives of my youtube account. But you had better believe I eradicated every last pixel of them before ever putting a trace of that game out on the internet or using it for profit. It's nothing more than the cost of doing business.
>> Now, how about you go out there and find someone to replace the art so it's legal? I'd bet there are plenty of Klax fans out there; I follow some of them on Twitter.
I have actually tried looking for a pixel artist to replace the art work, but not had much luck. Seriously I'll replace it if you can point someone in my direction!
It seems like you're more offended because the project directly promotes his for profit work rather than how he's using someone elses IP without permission.
If he called it a PoP clone, and didn't re-use the sprites, I feel like you'd still be a little mad.
Just playing devil's advocate though, I otherwise agree with you.
That is correct. I grew up exposed to a lot of casual IP violation in the indie game making scene and RPG Maker community, so I'm willing to tolerate a lot. The huge ad on the right and the layout of the author's consulting page is what upsets me the most.
Game clones are a pretty sticky subject as well but I feel like they at least have a long, defensible history in the genre and sometimes clones help advance the state of the art (even if you have cases like Dream Heights or Ninja Fishing where a clone has inflicted real and obvious harm on an indie developer).
>a lot of casual IP violation in the indie game making scene and RPG Maker community
The RPG Maker community in the West pretty much started with an unofficial (i.e., illegal) translation of RPG Maker 95 and 2000 into English by a Russian hacker. It's a interesting ethical conundrum to consider: we likely owe most of the great (and not so great) games made with those tools to the wide, illegal, availability of the tools themselves and their default art assets that provided a foundation one could built upon [1].
Perhaps this could be solved by either having a broad enough library of liberally licensed assets (the problem with those would be games that use them looking unoriginal are their use spreads) or a Ted Nelson-style system of transclusion [2] where you could reuse other people's content that would automatically give part of your profit from page views to them. The latter only covers compensation for copyright, obviously. When you get to trademarks it gets a lot more murky.
[1] One of the most well-known RPG Maker games is A Blurred Line (http://rpgmaker.net/games/92/). It offers a example of just what a solo developer can do with premade art assets and great storytelling (as evidenced by the fact that years later people are still asking for the final episode to be made).
http://opengameart.org/ seems to be a neat effort to provide that kind of public ___domain art.
Don Miguel's translations of RM95 and 2k are an interesting note for sure. They helped create and grow a market that the developers of RPG Maker now successfully sell to via Steam and other audiences with the latest versions of their product, and I'm sure the developers didn't have the resources to target that market at the time. Regardless, they were still illegal...
I'm really glad that community existed, either way. It was a pleasure to get to know some of the more brilliant developers and see them move onto bigger and better things. A Blurred Line's developer was snapped up by Turbine to work on games like LOTRO - hard work well rewarded, in my opinion, since he built a ton of really well-crafted, interesting games. I look back on the year or two I spent helping run rpgmaker.net pretty fondly, even if they were a harsh introduction to the real nature of the internet (remember eFront?)
> http://opengameart.org/ seems to be a neat effort to provide that kind of public ___domain art.
I like OpenGameArt and I hope to see it really prosper but right now it's still relatively small, at the industry scale.
I wonder if something like OpenGameArt could disrupt how smaller/indie games are made if it grew to a critical mass of art assets. Certainly, a clever developer can do a lot with what's already there, but imagine if there were dozens upon dozens of complete, consistent sets of art covering everything you might need to make a game of a given genre there. Perhaps we'd get a lot of identical-looking games competing on mechanics alone for the right to be the "definitive" game to use this or that tileset, sprite set, etc. I wouldn't mind seeing that.
>They helped create and grow a market that the developers of RPG Maker now successfully sell to via Steam and other audiences with the latest versions of their product
Looks like it's played out like a Microsoft-type strategy for them, whether deliberately or not. A lot of kids from who cut their teeth on doing horrible things to pirated copies of Windows 9x, NT 4.0 or 2000 are now Microsoft's paying customers. I think Gates talks about this in an interview somewhere.
>A Blurred Line's developer was snapped up by Turbine to work on games like LOTRO
That's good to hear. Although it probably means that the rumors of him secretly developing a remake/continuation of A Blurred Line are not to materialize.
>I look back on the year or two I spent helping run rpgmaker.net pretty fondly, even if they were a harsh introduction to the real nature of the internet (remember eFront?)
I participated in smaller, "local" RPG Maker communities and was mostly read-only in the larger ones but they were a constant source of discussion, art assets, tips and, of course, new games. With that in mind I have to thank you for contributing your part. It was certainly an interesting environment for a young aspiring game developer to be in.
On a sad note, too bad all such communities (and I don't just mean individual website or forums) eventually peter out. I feel that a lot of game development expertise disappears with them. Maybe a constantly evolving (free and open source?) game making tool could gather a similar community around it that would then last longer.
Both C&C and PoP are about 20 years old. If you consider the copyright terms that most pirate parties are advocating, this IP would be in the public ___domain already. The PoP franchise is owned by Ubisoft now, so you really can't make the "starving indie developer" argument in either case.
There is such a thing as Fair Use, and it covers many educational purposes. I think it's absolutely fair to include 15-20 year old content under that. No reasonable person could think he's claiming he invented C&C or PoP, the point is obviously the engine. All he's done is make his tech demos more appealing by banking on people's nostalgia and using a real world example to demonstrate relevance. When a gaming site publishes a "Top 50 Games from the 90s" list, the article also cannot exist without wholesale lifting of other people's IP. The only difference is that they steal a little bit from a lot of people, rather than a lot from just one IP owner. When said IP owner is a giant faceless corporate entity that doesn't pay royalties to its artists, is there really a difference?
I've also never seen anything wrong with abandonware, because it feels like digital preservationism, a volunteer-run cultural library. Companies like LucasArts hoarded their licenses until platforms like iOS gave them an easy way to milk them for more money, again about 20 years later... There wasn't any more creativity involved than what this guy did, and it's very likely none of the people who worked on the originals saw a cent of that money. And let's not forget that it was the efforts of the abandonware community in creating SCUMMVM that made it easy to port these games to modern platforms in the first place.
Copyright exists to encourage and reward the creation of culture, not to protect profits no matter what.
Edit: Come to think of it, I think it's far more disrespectful for Ubisoft to make a new Prince of Persia game with the original title, than for someone else to create a way to play the original in a modern environment and get some exposure along the way.
Who cares how old it is? This is really pretty simple:
a) It's not abandonware.
b) He put ads on it to make money.
Trying to compare what this guy is doing to the communities that preserve abandonware is laughable. Those people spend money out of their own pockets to make old works available for free to the public in their original forms.
"Please understand that this does NOT constitute a grant of rights of any kind in Prince of Persia, which is an ongoing Ubisoft game franchise. Ubisoft alone has the right to make and distribute Prince of Persia games."
My first 1000+ LOC program was a Qbasic routine to draw a pumping heart saying "I love you" mostly using PUTPIXEL(..) :) After laboring over that pumping heart dot qbas program, I finally worked up the courage on Valentine's Day to show it to this girl who I thought would fall in love with me after seeing it. Instead, she ran away & told her mom I was a freak messing with "the electronic compoooter" , so her mom got her married off to a proper MBA. She had me send "electronic mail" as email was called those days, to her rich friends using an AOL account.