Releasing code for dime a dozen shooters is one one thing, I guess,
with Sierra’s old adventure games I suspect you’re in a different
ballpark. Also with the old 3D games the fun of level editors and the
code is making your own mods and improvements and such. There’s not as
much
‘need’ for that and certainly not as much (at least perceived) target
market, between the user-apps of AGI and SCI Studio and the
decline of the adventure genre.
LOL,
I also have all the code for every program I wrote in high school. But
at least in the early days of Sierra, code just wasn’t saved or
documented like that. There’s a story (I forget where it’s from, either
Hackers or High Score probably) about another company taking Sierra to
court and they couldn’t prove a thing because Sierra didn’t keep or
document any of their code. Of course in Sierra’s golden era I’m sure
some code must have been kept, along with things like artwork, but then
there’s the horror stories of how so much stuff was simply thrown away
at the close of Oakhurst, for example.
I don’t think a petition would be a helpful thing in this case. I don’t
even know if NRS would be interested if approached by VU. I am
following some of my own lines of inquiry to see what can be done.
PS Ken> For some reason my messages are still all being truncacted
at the end of lines and appearing with double carriage returns between
lines when I’ve only put in single CRs. No one else’s messages seem to
be doing this. Here at work, I’m using Mozilla Firefox 1.0.7 on a Linux
Workstation.