Not sure if it's been done already, but since there are tons and tons of quality ancient abandonware, what if we tried to buy some of these games for the libre game community?
I think some of you will say these games have been written in Pascal in times when words like "code quality" didn't even exist, and that is true. Still, I think it would be worth it, because:
- Just the assets alone would be very valuable for developing new games.
- The game could be played by people who simply refuse to touch proprietary games, even if the code is ugly.
- Even if a complete rewrite or refactor was difficult, bug fixes and simple mods (like higher-res) would be much easily done with the source and the rights to collaborate on it.
- In the same manner just making the project compile and run natively (vs e.g. Dosbox) would be much less effort than developing a whole new game from scratch.
- With it being the possibility, some people would probably still likely find it a challenge and enjoyment to clean up the code. People enjoy all kinds of things you don't.
- People freeing their old games would send a generally positive message and encourage free culture. You've abandoned your project? Give it to the people and see what they create of it.
- With the legals rights to share and the source available it would be much easier to archive the game, share it on websites etc.
- The source, even if ugly, can be a good piece of history to study by the hackers. See e.g. what gold has been found in ID SW engines.
First step would have to be research -- finding the games. We'd need to find games developed ideally by only one or two people, because all developers would have to agree on freeing the game. This is thankfully the case with a lot of old games. Then we'd need to somehow organize this, vote for which games we'd want to buy, pool the money etc.
We'd need to decide what amount of money to pay the devs. I think we shouldn't negotiate, since it would be other people's money. We could either offer some fixed price per game, or e.g. make a rule, such as 100x the release price.
I'd bet we'd find a few good people who'd release the games for free just because they're fans of free SW and see the interest :-)
Now let me say I am not doing this, I am not the kind of person who does crowdfundig campaigns, or any projects involving people. I'd be glad if someone felt inspired to do this instead. I would try to contribute of course.
Any ideas? Potential games? Let's just talk about this.