would imagine that Activision has the rights to SCI, but the Codemasters owning LSL and at one time The Realm does throw a wrinkle in that. Most probably do not care as it is too dated of technology and if they even looked into it probably found that Havas threw it out. they have to realize that some of the ex-employees had to have some of the material, but it would not be worth pursuing.
...and I guess if they did obtain it from somewhere, there isn't much they could do with it. A lot of these games were made with DOS based tools. I doubt they're going to be using DOSBos to build more DOS based SCI0/1 games. Normally a company would be hanging on to source code so that they can make changes to an application. There seems to be no reason to do this for these games. Logically it seems like there should be no reason for them to hold back on allowing the tools, documentation, and source from those times to be publicly available. If they had it themselves, then it's possible that they could have been convinced to release it. But it seems more likely that they don't have it.
Do you think we'd benefit at all by approaching their legal departments to see what their view is?
Other things that I would love to see are the in house tools they used and the documentation. I came across something where a person was going to start working at Sierra and was given a manual on SCI to study before he began and was describing the similarity to Smalltalk. I think that this might have been from a link that Lance posted a couple of years ago.
Yeah, that was Mark Wilden:
http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/by_year/developerId,2205/I think it's okay to discuss the things he's publicly mentioned on his site, in forums, and on his blog, given they're all public. Some of those pages seem to have disappeared now, but we can still see it on the Wayback Machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20101219175024/http://www.mwilden.com/smalltalk/index.htmhttp://web.archive.org/web/20110219044800/http://www.rhinocerus.net/forum/lang-smalltalk/190289-games-smalltalk.htmlThis one is still alive:
http://mwilden.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/discovering-oop.htmlHere's an idea for the new Sierra, offer up SCI for free for new game development, much like some of the other game engines have been. It could help generate a new interest in Sierra.
Yeah, that would be great. It reminds me a bit of what happened with sarien.net. Activision asked Martin to take his JavaScript conversions of the games down from sarien.net, but after negotiating with them, Activision agreed to allow him to put back up the first games in each series. Activision's reasons were that it would encourage more people to buy the later games in each series and Martin had to put links through to places where those games could be bought.
Interestingly though, I notice now that he has most of them back up there. Maybe he got permissions for all of the Activision AGI games. The obvious omissions are LSL1 (which CodeMasters own), Gold Rush and the Manhunter games. Also missing is Mixed Up Mother Goose, Donald Duck's Playground, and KQ4. I'm guessing that he never converted the AGIv3 games, and besides, there's probably good reasons for not hosting those particularly three games. Gold Rush and Manhunter may potentially be owned by other companies (I still need to track that down) and KQ4 obviously has a SCI version that they might want people to purchase. For Mixed Up Mother Goose and Donald Duck's Playground, it might just be a case of those not having been converted. Can you even buy those games now?
