This Is How You Can Get To Free Access To Over 16,000 Video Games From 1978 To 2010

in The City of Neoxian4 years ago (edited)

This is not about piracy. You would be hard pressed to find a proper version of most of these games with enough seeds to complete the download in any reasonable time. You probably won't even find a complete version of the game. I'm talking about Abandonware. This is what Wikipedia has to say about them:

Abandonware is a product, typically software, ignored by its owner and manufacturer, and for which no official support is available. Although such software is usually still under copyright, the owner may not be tracking copyright violations.

Within an intellectual rights contextual background, abandonware is a software (or hardware) sub-case of the general concept of orphan works. Museums and various organizations, dedicated to preserving this software, continue to provide legal access.

My Abandonware - A Legal Grey Area

In USA copyright protection could last for the life of the author plus 50 years. In the realm of software and especially video games, this is almost an eternity. Most developers and publishes abandon their games after some years of generating revenue. Many companies go bankrupt and old games get remastered or remade. Things come to a point where the copyright holders are not making any money off of these titles. The worst part is that a large and important part of our electronic history is disappearing.

Some Companies Take A Proactive Stance (Sometimes)

The best recent example I can think of is Blizzard making the classic Starcraft (PC) free after adding some patches and making sure the nearly two decades old game compatible for Windows 10. This was node along with the 4K Remaster of the original.

Normally what we get to see is games getting abandoned and some of them were the groundbreaking AAA equivalent of those times. This is when My Abandonware comes to the rescue. The downloads are not exactly legal. But you are not hurting publisher's bottom line and nobody is really even trying to uphold the copyrights of many of the games anyways. They are literally like something abandoned at a random corner.

Support The Project! - Enjoy The History

Posted via neoxian.city | The City of Neoxian