On Thursday, January 26, 2023, segaloco via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

> We benefit from a general culture of openness surrounding UNIX these
> days.  We see no such openness from Nintendo, Sega, Sony, nor Microsoft in
> their video game offerings, neither current nor former, and similar for
> publishers and studios for the most part.  Anecdotally, when SquareEnix
> went to reissue Final Fantasy 8, they had to rewrite it from scratch as the
> original PS1 source code had been lost.  Apparently this is a pretty common
> problem plaguing efforts to roll older titles forward to modern systems,
> and is one of the reasons shoddy emulation seems to win out over
> intentional ports of anything.
>
> UNIX experienced the rather unique phenomenon of being able to grow legs
> in academia for many years before some legal types tried to put the kibosh
> on that.  Super Mario Bros. was a closed code base from day 1 with a tight
> deadline and little to no reason for it to be shared outside of its own
> development group.  The circumstances are just so wildly different.  UNIX
> is a bit of an anomaly as far as being an iconic, ubiquitous, still
> appreciated design that succeeds in academic *and* commercial spheres and
> also has ample source code and documentation history not only available but
> not constantly being torpedoed by lawyers.  I don't know that we'll see a
> willingness to open up the history of video game development like that in a
> timeframe that sensitive source codes and documents could still be properly
> preserved.
>
> Plus, to the defense of these studios, some algorithm or technique
> developed for management of game resources may still be very much relevant
> to modern engine designs in ways that OS code from the 70s simply wouldn't
> even have a place in modern design.  I wouldn't be surprised if there are
> scene graph and asset manager algorithms and such down in, say, the Zelda
> 64 engine, that the big N is *still* using in comparable engines and
> considers a trade secret.  Hard to say.  But anywho, just to draw some
> comparisons to the preservation state of UNIX vs other technological
> innovations.  We have decades of quality OS code to study, research, and
> expand upon as hackers, but we have no such wealth of real video game
> source codes to educate the masses on game design, especially embedded
> console/bare metal approaches.  This is where the crossroads lies for me
> between my UNIX and game development interests, I would LOVE some day for
> there to be as accessible and quality of resources for those studying the
> history of game design/development as there are for those studying OS
> design.  After all, the way I describe old games to people in a technical
> sense is its just a specific type of OS.  That programmer had to abstract
> all that hardware into concepts like button triggers movement of VDP
> scrollplanes and emission of commands to the FM synth chip.  The thing
> you're using is just a Dpad instead of a mouse and you're moving a silly
> little character instead of a window across the screen.
>
>
The closest I can think of in the game industry to the open source
community of Unix/Linux is Doom/Quake. Doom source code was opened in 1997
and Quake in 1999 and since then we have experienced a whole generation of
programmers and artists playing with, porting and enhancing the codebase. I
don't know of any other game development project that has as much longevity
as those two; and all of it happened because John Carmack made the decision
to open source it based on the popularity of open source Linux at the time.

--Andy