I don't have much to add except to say that I think this is a stand-out example of how companies and preservationists should work together and not against each other. The childish folks who are upset about this aren't familiar with the realties of either open source games perseveration nor the realities of being an IP holder. This is as close as we have gotten to the Good Place. I wish Atari luck on the re-release and I hope that anyone who's upset about it reflects on why they are upset.
This is about as much as you can hope for tbh. More than a fair compromise.
Society has become quite 'entitled' to 'free' things. As popular as they are, torrents and free streams and emulation and clones of games in an open source lib are all stealing something. I know thats an unpopular thing to say but it a fact.
Now, those rights violations viewed in a larger context may change one's opinion on the whole, and I'm not jumping into that debate today.
Atari did a cool thing. That's rare in the corporate world today. Give praise where it's deserved.
Are they really stealing it though? They only brought the IP 30 years later they didnt make it or put any work towards it. The openTTD community has easily done 100x the work to extend the game.
First, I agree it's cool that Atari, with all its ability to completely screw small projects over, didn't do that in this case.
But, at the same time, I find it interesting that "emulations and clones" are considered entitlement (in a derogatory sense), but copyright protection is not. Before 1976 in the US, the _maximum_ copyright term was 56 years, and that would require filing for an extension from the default of _only 28 years_.
I think it's easy to forget that copyright as we know it is not set in stone. Historically, after 28 years, most works became public domain and that meant you could do literally whatever you want with it and it would not be legally stealing at all. I think we as a society have forgotten what it means to have a public domain.
I think it's interesting to look at your opinion (not you particularly, but everyone) and see if it would have been different if instead of "Atari" it was "Chris Sawyer".
If it would have been, then there's probably an inconsistency somewhere.
I don't think it's inconsistent to think that a person's right to their IP is worthy of respect but a faceless corporation's isn't. you can disagree, but it's not an inconsistency.
The distinction is that people respect people who make things they like. That's good, and noble: no matter what kind of topsy-turvy economic system you live under, making stuff is a valuable (not always the most valuable, but valuable nonetheless) skill, because people need and want stuff.
People who merely buy stuff to extract rent from it are, at best, a necessary evil. There's nothing admirable in rentseeking behavior. It's just playing the game.
If we're hanging around a campfire in the paleolithic, the guy who figured out how to make beer is going to be everyone's best friend. The guy who won't let anybody drink from the stream because it's "his" is liable to meet an unfortunate end.
I think the difference in sentiment is between "I created this and I would like to continue deriving benefit from it" versus "we bought this and we would like it to retain its value". again this is not about the legal difference, just how people personally feel about it.
Eh, Sawyer's career has left him a multi-millionaire, and Transport Tycoon is the foundation of that. If you've already made several lifetimes worth of income, I also don't really care about your IP rights anymore.
Sort of. Releasing something into the world is, in a real sense, giving it up. At some point, you don't have ownership of it anymore. You're the one that created it, but you're no longer in control of it.
Copyright being as extremely long as it is makes us think that making something once means we should profit from it in perpetuity, but that's not really beneficial for society to work like that. That's exactly why patents don't work like that.
Remember, the purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation of new works. Well, if you can create one work and profit from it effectively (i.e., your entire career), why would you create another work? That's just a waste of effort. That's literally the business model of IP holding companies. They don't create. They just own. They're rent-seeking.
As a sidenote, this whole situation implies just how important platforms are.
Nothing about OpenTTD has changed. You can literally just go download it off their website for free - same as it was 20 years ago. And you can add it to your Steam library just fine. It's only been on the Steam store for 5 of those years.
But the open internet is dead now and just being "de-merchandised" from a platform feels like being relegated to the dark web (maybe something the open source community doesn't quite fully appreciate).
> You can literally just go download it off their website for free
That's cumbersome. The main benefit of platforms is comfort. Steam takes care of installation and updating, while often also offers some access with the community. Open internet has more choice and liberty, but for the price of more work and annoyance.
That the main reason why all big platforms succeed and the small platforms fail. Comfort is just too valuable.
OpenTTD has an automatic update mechanism already and its installation is as simple as could be.
Steam succeeded because of its store, which still has the best prices on the market. That’s their original moat. Their current moat is sunk costs. People have thousands of dollars in their Steam Library. At this point Steam’s advantages as software are negligible, especially considering its poor performance.
I don't remember how I first heard about slashdot, but I know I discovered debian and enlightenment through it, and I would assume I discovered openttd through it.
Perhaps some comment on a forum or usenet somwhere. Or perhaps on a compuserve group. Or maybe someone else at school.
Open internet is dead only to those that don't take the effort to discover. Otherwise it's still as open as it always was.
Since there was an internet to speak of, there always were and still are vast amounts of people unaware of stuff that exists, limited by no "platforms" but only by their own lack of desire.
That is true to some extent. However, let me ask you one simple question: how would you try to search for something if you are not aware of it's existence? In other words, how people that are not aware of existence of open-source projects (such as OpenTTD) are supposed to discover them if they're not searching for them on purpose (which is impossible given that they have no clue about their existence)?
Of course there will be some ways like social media or something else. But that question is what seems to worry many people in our case, in my humble opinion. Remember that most of the planet's population is not even aware of existence of open-source projects and open-source concept itself. So how are they supposed to discover it if they don't know about it? When it's present on platforms like Steam and GOG, it helps to spread the word, but when it's not... Well, I guess that seems to be a problem for some people.
> how would you try to search for something if you are not aware of it's existence?
You're asking a leading question. The verb you're using here is one specifically indicating interaction with a "platform" (a digital aggregation of information). The answer is you don't search anything, you completely change your epistemic and interaction model. Instead you build a social web of people who have their own social webs, and you share things you've made and things that have been shared with you. This is your "platform".
> how would you try to search for something if you are not aware of it's existence?
How are most games on steam found? I kinda doubt all people find them through steam own mechanisms. I even doubt the majority find them this way. Gaming has multiple sources of information, be it news, social media, influencers or cooperations. Video-content is probably the biggest source of being discovered for most games these days.
By googling "best open source games" and finding blogs and forums that talk about them. In fact googling that exact phrase returns as its first search result a Reddit thread in which OpenTTD is one of the first games listed.
It's not like you can discover it on Steam any easier.
Of course, searching for information itself is also a skill, but it is a truly essential one for the modern world.
> In other words, how people that are not aware of existence of open-source projects (such as OpenTTD) are supposed to discover them if they're not searching for them on purpose (which is impossible given that they have no clue about their existence)?
This question tickles me. In the before time, something would be so good you were compelled to tell someone about it.
Sriracha, Costco are brands you likely know that dont advertise, and somehow got popular. In the 90's there were bands that were massively popular with little to no air play, and less promotion (Fugazi is a great example).
My introduction to their Sriracha was in 1994, when the Puerto Rican cook at the Italian restaurant I worked at sent me to Stop and Shop for the "rooster".
Till hosing their relationship with Underwood Ranch (their sole provider of chili's) this was the only product in the marketplace (much like ketchup was always Heinz for a time). Absolute market dominance wrecked over not honoring your handshake deal with your ONLY supplier.
The latest batches by them are green, and no one wants them. The underwood version of the product is taking over --- it has a giant dragon on the bottle now, and what I look for now rather than the rooster.
Right. This is a chicken-egg problem. We also need a replacement for google search; Google ruined it, on purpose. We are being made blind (not totally blind, but dumber, and then blind).
Technology Connections referred to this as “algorithmic complacency”, young people don’t like Bluesky because they have to decide for themselves what content to follow instead of a default algorithm feed
I use a similar argument to those who say that gaming is dead. Sure, if you're waiting for $AAA_DEVELOPER to change, it's probably dead, but you don't even have to look that far to find amazing games everywhere in indie and AA.
Sadly indie developers are only just starting get into my preferred genre. I am excited to see how a number of upcoming titles turn out, but for the time I’m stuck waiting for $AAA_DEVELOPER to change.
I’ve had half the mind to just try my own hand at game dev again.
Short of developing psychic abilities, how would you then address the discoverability problem without relying on a third party?
Forums, search engines, social media, and link aggregators are all third parties with their own ranking. Nobody outside of a handful of small-web hobbyists have put a "cool links" section into a website since 1997.
This is classic engineering missing the forest for the trees.
The answer to your question is: same as we always did before! Do you talk to friends? Colleagues? Family? You definitely chat with us here on HN. All of these people share things with you constantly.
There's a funny obsession in tech circles to gather all the information they can as quick as possible. I much prefer to optimize for the quality of information I'm ingesting.
There’s always a relationship aspect in discoverability. Unless the set is small, there will always be intermediary nodes in that graph that will connect consumers and producers. But there’s no need for it to be a mega tech company. Radio DJs help with discovering musics. Books club can help with recommending books.
Doesn't need to be, but most traffic is driven by search. I reckon 2nd most common is influencers, and I don't know if that's an upgrade (even easier to buy out).
This is as good an argument as saying that Americans with unhealthy diets bear sole responsibility, ignoring the massive corporate efforts to convince them of the healthfulness of highly processed foods. While, obviously, individuals have ultimate responsibility for their actions, ignoring the concerted efforts to influence those actions through psychology, marketing/ads, paid “experts”, paid influencers and celebrities, lobbies, blah blah et cetera.
When I started using the internet, if I asked someone what the internet was I was unlikely to get any answer at all. It was new. I had to define it for myself. Ask a 6 year old what the internet is. It’s YouTube. TikTok. Roblox. Experiences that are designed to keep them there. It is obviously more difficult for an individual to engage with the open web than it ever has been (for those with access at all).
>ignoring the concerted efforts to influence those actions
Ignorance isn't the point. The issue is that it's your responsibility to stop them. the buck always stops at "I". Are they just going to stop themselves? Is your neighbor going to stop them for you? If so, why should she if you don't?
As Kant said, enlightenment is getting out of your self inflicted tutelage. When is it self inflicted? When you have the reason but lack the courage to act without direction from someone else.
Yes, there's influencers and lobbies but the solutions are still one search away. Even Google doesn't hide the alternatives from you. And sure we can force feed every American veggies and force install linux on their computers but that'd defeat the point.
> It is obviously more difficult for an individual to engage with the open web than it ever has been (for those with access at all).
It’s very easy. If you’re a producer, you maintain a separate presence outside the walled platforms. If you’re a consumer, you look outside the walled platform for content.
>It’s very easy. If you’re a producer, you maintain a separate presence outside the walled platforms.
I want to try one day. Steam's pricing parity adds friction to that, though. I can't reward people for venturing to a place where they own their software, and that seems to be the only real way to move many.
One alternative is the Nintendo route. Another is the Hololive route, wherein they started a publishing brand for indie fangames which they actively support and promote on an official Steam store page. Another example being Touhou, a one-man indie franchise with permissive commercial derivative works licensing, which has become a cultural phenomenon in Japan and to a lesser extent overseas thanks to an absolutely vibrant community that has made millions of fan illustrations, tens of thousands of albums, and thousands of fangames, hundreds of which are sold on Steam.
If megacorps would stop being stuck up their own ass and completely irrational about how they exercise their IP rights, they would actually be able to benefit massively from allowing their fan communities to flourish. The status quo doesn't have to be this shitty, and we don't necessarily need to give credit to companies who meet the incredibly low bar of "not Nintendo".
Atari is very kind to say you can keep distributing a fan game, just not on a commercial storefront.
I don’t expect to see Sonic Fan games on Steam anytime soon. Even though Sega is one of the best publishers in this regard.
Now if OpenTDD said no , we’re leaving it on Steam for free ,Atari could probably contact Valve to get it delisted.
A compromise is not a loss. I’ve downloaded tons of applications and games without Steam holding my hand and somehow I’m ok. Although I do wish sandboxing solutions with better gpu support existed
Fully agree, and glad you posted this. Atari has no responsibility to the open source community, and indeed has every reason to push back against this effort. That they're willing to discuss things at all, and that they agree to help support the effort, is frankly astonishing and extremely kind-hearted.
At the same time, the open source community has absolutely no responsibility to make Atari profits here either. The outcome here is simply that open source is getting screwed over
It isn't kind hearted. Them trying to shut down openttd would lead to a gigantic clusterfuck that would hurt their sales. This is them trying to remove a direct competitor to them releasing a new game as much as possible, without generating community backlash - to maximise profits
It may have been "screwed over" if there was no access to the oss game. But you can still download the game from their website. They just do not want that these appear as competitors in steam/gog platforms, so they bundled the oss version. Both sides thought this was a reasonable resolution. Thus I don't see "screwing over" here.
Open source is a culture that includes its users. Open source is getting screwed over because at the first whiff of a capitalist losing a buck open source retreated and hid.
Imagine if you were Atari. You've bought the rights to Transport Tycoon Deluxe from Chris Sawyer and want to sell the game up on Steam. Then you see OpenTTD (the exact same game except better in every way) also on Steam for free. What do you do?
You put it up for sale and hope nostalgia sells something for you aka the original plan.
This argument is like "you buy a McDonald's then realize there is a burger king across the road. What do you do?" Yes one is a clone of the other. But you don't get to just bulldoze the burger king.
In the first place, the game is 30 years old. If the world had a sane copyright regime, it would already be in the public domain. Nobody should be particularly entitled to buying abandoned 30-year-old IPs and squatting on them to collect rent. All the more so when there would be no rent to collect if not for the derivative work being literally the only thing keeping the IP alive.
But let's suppose I am Atari and I have for some reason proceeded with buying said abandonware without doing my research. Upon discovering OpenTTD, I would hire the guy behind OpenTTD to work on a commercial version, keeping OpenTTD free to play but perhaps with some cool monetized expansion pack that would not have been possible without giving the developer the funding they need to work on it. That way I am making an investment in actually adding value to the game, and rewarding the person who kept it alive and in turn earning community goodwill, instead of investing in a shortsighted attempt to collect rent that backfires massively.
I think it could be beneficial for players, if having a passionate developer able to spend more time working on it allows them to make future evolutions significantly better than they could be in a world where the developer only has time to work on it passively. That said, I am generally a proponent of indie game developers being paid for their work, as an indie game developer myself, so my personal bias may certainly leaking be leaking into my evaluation :)
I'd note it also doesn't need to be done in a way that deprives players of any free future evolution. Paradox has a nice model for their games where they release expansion packs, where about half the content is part of a free update to the base game and half the content is paid. That would be perfectly suited for a case like this.
I go "oops I probably should have realised that existed before I decided to purchase the rights to and re-release a 999999 year old game which already has a GPL clone/spiritual successor/something".
I then go "well why re-release this ancient game running in an emulator, when this exists?" and ask the core team of OpenTTD if they want to monetize their steam/GOG releases now that I can licence out the TTD IP to them and remove any remaining legal ambiguity (and recoup my """investment""" via revenue sharing).
And if they don't I take it as a learning experience (to do my homework before I buy IPs) and release my TTD-in-an-emulator on steam and GOG knowing full well that its probably not going to generate many sales. Maybe I add "hey just so you know there's this really cool modern source port you can get for free..." to the description and hope that I can generate some sales off of good boy points.
>Additionally, as part of the discussions we held, Atari agreed to make a contribution towards the running costs of our server infrastructure. We are also extremely grateful for the many donations that have come in over the past few days from users - your support will help keep our services going, and it is deeply appreciated.
Without knowing the rev share it could be exploitative. If OpenTDD is being sold commercially Atari shouldn't be taking all the money from all the hard work that people have put into the project over the years.
Agreed. Effectively-nobody would be interested in buying it if it weren't for OpenTTD and all the improvements they've made over the years.
It's absurd that some company can buy up and profit from thirty-year-old formerly-abandonware, and that society have been collectively browbeaten into believing in the notion of “““intellectual property””” at all.
No, they don't. They own the game data, and the original game engine. They don't own the reimplemented Open Source game engine.
OpenTTD did not have to do anything here. It sounds like they had a very positive interaction with Atari, in which Atari is providing them with some support and collaboration, and in exchange for that, OpenTTD agreed to formalize the requirement for "you need to own the original game data" by having people on game stores purchase the original game through them before getting OpenTTD through them.
That seems like a pretty reasonable approach. It should be held up as a good model for collaboration. But it shouldn't be treated as "they have every right to [demand a] cease and desist".
Though it's no longer a clone, it literally was a clone when it first started (you were even supposed to supply your own totally legitimately acquired asset packs).
So it'd be pretty much impossible to claim the engine came about as a clean room implementation. And of course, even if maybe they could win a court case (honestly don't think they could) the mere threat of one would likely make openttd quit.
CorsixTH requires Theme Hospital assets but we didn't clone or otherwise steal anything that we ship, we require you to supply the assets precisely because we aren't. I presume that's true of OpenTTD as well. In the United States copyright protection for games covers the art and text but not the rules and Oracle vs. Google established reimplentations being fair even when exposing the same api. Truely novel game rules can be protected by patents per Nintendo.
> you were even supposed to supply your own totally legitimately acquired asset packs
I don't have the impression that OpenTTD encouraged or sanctioned obtaining those assets illegitimately. They talked about how to extract them from the original game that you owned.
Reverse engineering for compatibility, and implementation of a compatible system (as long as you don't copy the original) are not just legal, they're explicitly legally protected in many jurisdictions. You'll get in serious trouble if you copy the original, but there is specific case law supporting things like emulators. See, for instance, Sony v Connectix and Sega v Accolade.
But OpenTTD is explicitly a faithful copy of the original. It replicates the original product in appearance and behavior and is open about it. If you were to dig into source code history, mailing list archives, chat logs etc. I'm certain that you could find a lot of evidence to support this position.
It's... complicated; they own Transport Tycoon Deluxe, its code, its assets and its IP.
Back when OpenTTD first released, it was a decompile (?) of TTD that loaded the assets of the game itself. This was... legally dubious, since reverse engineering.
But over time they Ship of Theseus'd the game - all code rewritten from assembly to C/C++ (I don't know), open source asset packs, etc. It's still the same base game, same feel, etc but nothing of the original code or assets remain.
I don't know enough about IP law etc to judge whether Atari would have any leg to stand on in a court of law, but it would be Complicated to say the least.
I'm glad that Atari was willing to compromise at all. I'm happy with the updated response, and hope that it helps others understand the nuance of the situation. Anyone can still go download the main release from the official site.
How are people supposed to understand the "nuance of the situation" when they aren't even sharing it? What is the problem to begin with? Why can't both projects continue to exist independently?
The bundling might feel necessary from Atari's side because OpenTTD would compete with Atari's re-release on platforms like Steam and GoG (unlike on OpenTTD's website, where you're already at the end of the funnel for OpenTTD specifically and therefore Atari doesn't feel like they're losing a sale).
The problem is copyright won't expire on the 1995 game until some time next century, while a French company that acquired Atari's name and copyrights 20 years ago is now asserting their exclusive rights over the IP.
OpenTTD started from the ip they now own, and it's possible Atari could try and prove that in court. I don't know if they would win, but why spend the legal fees here?
I'm sure I'm missing some context but what is Atari's role here exactly? Isn't OpenTTD an independent and fully legal project? What is Atari's basis for asking for a "compromise"?
Or is it just the case that the project maintainers got paid off?
These are not people ripping off TTD to make a buck. If you absolutely love the game so much that you spent 20 years modding it, you're going to have some respect for the original and the publisher and are probably glad they are interested again.
I get that it's not the same Atari as it was 30 years ago. But I liken it to you being a Beatles cover band and the estate of John Lennon reaches out to you, you're going to treat them with some sort of respect.
While OpenTTD is open source, it's basis is really that the original game was reverse-engineered, originally using the original assets, and then rebuilt.
Also all the map data etc is owned by Atari, so you need to have a 'genuine' copy to access all the levels etc.
Note that, while it is a rewrite, it was done so through disassembling the original game, not via a clean room implementation. I find this particularly relevant given that the original was written (mostly) in assembly too.
The fact that these exist does not mean that they're immune from legal challenge. If the original creators wanted to sue, there are all kinds of claims that would have a decent shot in court (e.g. trademark, trade dress, design patents) besides "you copied our copyrighted source code." The clones exist more because people are being cool about it, and because there's not a strong economic incentive to challenge them. Those things can change at any time.
Out of the two claims, the only one that made it to appeals court was about whether it was fair use for Bleem to use screenshots of PS1 games to advertise its emulator (which was compatible with those games). The Ninth Circuit decided it was. But that's not relevant here.
The other claim was more relevant, as it was an unfair competition claim that apparently had something to do with Bleem's reimplementation of the PS1 BIOS. But the district court's record of the case doesn't seem to be available online, and the information I was able to find online was vague, so I don't know what exactly the facts or legal arguments were on that claim. Without an appeal it also doesn't set precedent.
If there were a lawsuit over OpenTTD, it would probably be for copyright infringement rather than unfair competition, and it would probably focus more on fair use and copyrightability. For fair use, it matters how much something is functional versus creative. The PS1 BIOS is relatively functional, but a game design and implementation are highly creative. On the other hand, despite being creative, game mechanics by themselves are not copyrightable. So it might come down to the extent to which OpenTTD's code was based on the reverse-engineered original code, as opposed to being a truly from-scratch reimplementation of the same mechanics. Visual appearance would also be relevant. Oracle v. Google would be an important precedent.
It might be improved and changed in many ways. But I have zero doubt it would not lose in court any argument over copyrights. Most reasonable people would tell that it looks way too close to original. And that would probably be enough.
1. OpenTTD is not a clean room rewrite. It started by disassembling the original game and manually converting to C++ on a piecemeal basis.
2. As the game was updated, sure lots of this code has been rewritten. Almost certainly the majority. But has all of it been legally rewritten? Ehh... much less clear.
This sort of process has generally been held to produce a derived work of whatever you're cloning, even if the final result no longer contains original code, hence why clean room reverse engineering even became a thing in the first place.
It's probably fuzzy enough at this stage that you could have a long expensive drawn out legal battle about it (and I suspect we'll see at least one for some other project in the coming years with the recent trend of "I had AI rewrite this GPL project to my MIT licensed clone"). Would OpenTTD win? Who knows. Could OpenTTD afford it? Certainly not.
Correct me if I'm wrong but wasn't BSD in a similar legal limbo for a while? In that case wouldn't there be precedent for such projects to be legally fine so long as they've existed long enough and been heavily modified?
If I were to create a new game from the ground up, with new artistic assets, and not an LLM in sight, with the characters of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader playing around on the Millenium Falcon, I would be breaching copyright.
I'm not sure if look and feel of a game like Transport Tycoon can be copyrighted, but I wouldn't like to be against it.
(I remember buying Transport Tycoon from I think Beatles, in Altrincham. I clearly remember riding on the front seat of the bus upstairs on my way to Flixton back in 1994 reading the manual)
Reproducing the surface behavior of a program, no matter how faithfully, is not in itself copyright violation if it's a cleanroom implementation. But int this case it's not to write the new one, the developers studied (and manually translated to C++) the original code, not just the program's behavior. So this is more of a case of a derived work, like a translation of a novel.
And Sony vs Bleem (or the IBM BIOS reimplementation) already set a precedent so that doesn't really matter anymore. Look at Wine. Or Exegutor. Or DOSBox.
All of them totally legal reimplementing either prior look and feel and functionality.
> The code of computer programs are excluded from design protection, but visual aspects of software are very commonly protectable as long as they are ‘new’ (i.e. not a direct copy of anything that has come before) and possess ‘individual character’ (i.e. that the design produces a different ‘overall impression’ than anything that has come before)
I'm no expect, but Chris Sawyer style games certainly provided a unique overall impression to me. Whether it needs to be a registered design or not I couldn't say, but it's not going to be cheap to find out.
More recent battles have relied on Trademark and Patent law rather than Copyright, but "Look and Feel" is still a legal grey area
While Atari holds the rights to Transport Tycoon, I'd argue that at this point taking OpenTTD down would be a huge footgun; like Nintendo with emulators, they can also buy / license the engine and re-release the game on modern platforms under its official name.
The initial post has omitted any reason for the change. Of course people would speculate, including in the HN comments.
What seemed majority at the time was the idea of some collaboration/partnership and monetary exchange.
I think its a good lesson in communication, especially when you have a dedicated community. Transparency is welcome.
Regarding Atari and "their rights", there hasn't been an Atari for way too long and the IP was passed between companies left and right without additive value to users. I expect transport tycoon to be another cash grab, but happy to be surprised for the better.
Atari being the commercial firm it is, I could very well imagine that stuff was under NDA. Just 'by default', because that's what the lawyers like. And only when angry speculations emerged they could be persuaded to just openly communicate.
Or the OpenTTD guys were not the best communicators. Considering it's the OpenTTD creators live at the intersection of the groups 'programmers' and 'adults who like to play with train sets' it wouldn't be a stretch.
All in all I think this collaborative approach is very much the preferred outcome.
All those people saying 'the open web is dead' and 'people don't download from websites anymore' are exaggerating imo.
After installing TTD from GOG I panicked a bit, not seeing any DOSBox or DOS files. For a moment I thought it was files from an old Windows 95 version only, but there was (also) a DOS installer (INSTALL.EXE). I ran that, went through all the usual steps (select Sound Blaster IRQs and so on) and now I can run it from my virtual (git-managed) DOS disk install directory where I install all my DOS games and applications. Next to the original TT that I installed a few months ago from an old CD-ROM. For completeness.
I am very happy that this long stand grey area licensing situation around something I enjoy deeply has been resolved in what seems like the most perfect way possible
In situations like this it's odd to me that the rightsholder wouldn't just sell an official build of the FOSS reimplementation with the assets (legally) included. If some of the proceeds end up going toward the FOSS reimplementation's donations then it seems like an easy win-win.
There are actually cases this has happened in (e.g. re-releases using ScummVM under the hood; id basing products on community source ports, etc.), but it's not always that simple.
Chris Sawyer as creator for example is known to have particular opinions on this as I recall, and if you e.g. look over to film making there's also a hot debate over preserving original artistic intent and original creations over later remasters. OpenTTD is more than a maintenance upgrade, it's a continuation and a different game.
Honestly I think it's probably just OK what Atari has done here. Monetizing the original assets is well in their rights both legally and morally (especially considering e.g. royalities to Chris), OpenTTD remains available everywhere, they're monetarily supporting OpenTTS, gamers will find it.
Note that once a commercial company decides to ship a FOSS project, they also are much more invested in potentially controlling its direction to different ends. This setup keeps OpenTTD community-run and independent, free to make decisions independent of a commercial agenda. This also feels worth protecting.
Another example is Heroes III with VCMI and HotA and other similar things. Some are attempts to do a bug-for-bug "vanilla" recreation, others expand on it in defined ways, still others add new features "in the spirit" of the original.
When you get to the last, you can definitely see how the original creator/artists could disagree.
So they were not "pressured" but Atari contacted them and they proceeded to make this decision based because they "needed to balance Atari’s commercial interests".
That sound indistinguishable from being pressured.
Reaching compromises with others is part of life. If the question is whether a copyright from 1995 should hold in this case, I would say no. But the world is sometimes not as we may want it to be. So taking that for granted, this seems like a very reasonable and mature resolution.
The types of folks who make reimplemented game engines often do it as a labor of love towards the original. And the best companies often have great appreciation for their modding communities and preservationists. (Witness the good collaborations between some companies and SCUMMVM, for instance.) This may well have been a conversation that was entirely reasonable and respectful.
I just can't believe that given the outcome and the wording of the posts from the project. If there was respect here there would have been no threats. If there were no threats there would be no talk of "balancing commercial interests"
I think they're saying Atari didn't threaten them but they both understood that they could have. Honestly it sounds like Atari were trying to be nice. Like "you technically aren't allowed to do that, and we could just set our lawyers on you, but we'd like to not do that while also making money on our re-release".
This seems like a perfectly reasonable compromise to me.
In the same way that "you kids aren't allowed to skate here, but maybe if you do it over there I could just turn around and not notice you" isn't a threat.
you know, given that i've often said "if youre getting it for free, your the product" i am ok with this
its not really possible for the rights holder to compete with a free product, since they arent harvesting data or oxploiting the userbase, so they need to charge. and openTTD getting a cut of the money really does show that this is fully collaborative
Seems reasonable to me. Back when I started playing OpenTTD, about 20 years ago, you had to provide your own data files from your ostensibly legal copy of TTD. They changed that after they started distributing free alternative graphics, but to be frank the strict legal status of both OpenTTD and OpenRCT2 has always seemed mildly dubious to me, on account of both projects being based off disassembled code. Atari is being fairly reasonable and gentlemenly about this.
> we have not been “pressured” by Atari to make these changes.
> Atari approached us to explain their plans for the Transport Tycoon Deluxe re-release, and what it might mean for OpenTTD.
> we understood that a compromise would be needed to balance Atari’s commercial interests […] against the availability of a free, well-developed evolution of the game.
Sounds to me like you were pressured by Atari to make these changes.
Everyone's being diplomatic, including most of the HN comments.
This seems to be the simplest compromise, and allows OpenTTD to continue existing without too many problems from Atari, so people don't want to make waves.
There is no way not to, OpenTTD has 0 cards to play since everything is explicitly build on IP that is not theirs, and they know it. They were "not pressured" because Atari didn't utter threats to them, it didn't need to come to that because the OpenTTD people were reasonable, and so was Atari.
Not sure why so many commenters are failing to grasp this.
it is neither being delisted, nor was it requested to be. As far as rights holders exercising their rights, this is about the most collaborative way it could have gone. Not every rights holder is a John Carmack.
Agreed. Publishers need to be knocked off this absurd moral high ground. If merely being rich is enough for me to profit off of Miles Davis songs for decades after his death, copyright is just another wealth redistribution to the rich. Steal all the games and music, and any ghoul that claims I’m stifling creativity can compare their compositions to mine.
I mean, yeah. There's enough nukes locked and loaded around the globe to end human civilization as we know it in minutes. Nobody's made a bomb that can fix socioeconomics.
Now with AI I wonder if it’s possible to just let agents build a perfect emulation of the game. It reminds me of fuzzers. You let the agent go loose on the game and it brute forces every possible state. Then recreates the code. It’s very inefficient- but it probably works.
You’re going to brute force every possible state of a sandbox building game. See you on the other side of the heat death of the universe; hope you stocked up on Claude Code credits.
Society has become quite 'entitled' to 'free' things. As popular as they are, torrents and free streams and emulation and clones of games in an open source lib are all stealing something. I know thats an unpopular thing to say but it a fact.
Now, those rights violations viewed in a larger context may change one's opinion on the whole, and I'm not jumping into that debate today.
Atari did a cool thing. That's rare in the corporate world today. Give praise where it's deserved.
But, at the same time, I find it interesting that "emulations and clones" are considered entitlement (in a derogatory sense), but copyright protection is not. Before 1976 in the US, the _maximum_ copyright term was 56 years, and that would require filing for an extension from the default of _only 28 years_.
I think it's easy to forget that copyright as we know it is not set in stone. Historically, after 28 years, most works became public domain and that meant you could do literally whatever you want with it and it would not be legally stealing at all. I think we as a society have forgotten what it means to have a public domain.
If you're going that far, aren't proprietary games and software "stealing" open source libs too? I think your definition is a bit wonky.
This is an unpopular opinion because it is not, in fact, a fact.
If it would have been, then there's probably an inconsistency somewhere.
You can make that argument, but you need to actually do so and not just leave it unsaid.
People who merely buy stuff to extract rent from it are, at best, a necessary evil. There's nothing admirable in rentseeking behavior. It's just playing the game.
If we're hanging around a campfire in the paleolithic, the guy who figured out how to make beer is going to be everyone's best friend. The guy who won't let anybody drink from the stream because it's "his" is liable to meet an unfortunate end.
Copyright being as extremely long as it is makes us think that making something once means we should profit from it in perpetuity, but that's not really beneficial for society to work like that. That's exactly why patents don't work like that.
Remember, the purpose of copyright is to encourage the creation of new works. Well, if you can create one work and profit from it effectively (i.e., your entire career), why would you create another work? That's just a waste of effort. That's literally the business model of IP holding companies. They don't create. They just own. They're rent-seeking.
Nothing about OpenTTD has changed. You can literally just go download it off their website for free - same as it was 20 years ago. And you can add it to your Steam library just fine. It's only been on the Steam store for 5 of those years.
But the open internet is dead now and just being "de-merchandised" from a platform feels like being relegated to the dark web (maybe something the open source community doesn't quite fully appreciate).
That's cumbersome. The main benefit of platforms is comfort. Steam takes care of installation and updating, while often also offers some access with the community. Open internet has more choice and liberty, but for the price of more work and annoyance.
That the main reason why all big platforms succeed and the small platforms fail. Comfort is just too valuable.
Steam succeeded because of its store, which still has the best prices on the market. That’s their original moat. Their current moat is sunk costs. People have thousands of dollars in their Steam Library. At this point Steam’s advantages as software are negligible, especially considering its poor performance.
Perhaps some comment on a forum or usenet somwhere. Or perhaps on a compuserve group. Or maybe someone else at school.
Since there was an internet to speak of, there always were and still are vast amounts of people unaware of stuff that exists, limited by no "platforms" but only by their own lack of desire.
Of course there will be some ways like social media or something else. But that question is what seems to worry many people in our case, in my humble opinion. Remember that most of the planet's population is not even aware of existence of open-source projects and open-source concept itself. So how are they supposed to discover it if they don't know about it? When it's present on platforms like Steam and GOG, it helps to spread the word, but when it's not... Well, I guess that seems to be a problem for some people.
Presumably, through social interaction with others in the communities they are a part of. That's how I heard about OpenTTD in the early 00s, at least.
You're asking a leading question. The verb you're using here is one specifically indicating interaction with a "platform" (a digital aggregation of information). The answer is you don't search anything, you completely change your epistemic and interaction model. Instead you build a social web of people who have their own social webs, and you share things you've made and things that have been shared with you. This is your "platform".
How are most games on steam found? I kinda doubt all people find them through steam own mechanisms. I even doubt the majority find them this way. Gaming has multiple sources of information, be it news, social media, influencers or cooperations. Video-content is probably the biggest source of being discovered for most games these days.
It's not like you can discover it on Steam any easier.
Of course, searching for information itself is also a skill, but it is a truly essential one for the modern world.
This question tickles me. In the before time, something would be so good you were compelled to tell someone about it.
Sriracha, Costco are brands you likely know that dont advertise, and somehow got popular. In the 90's there were bands that were massively popular with little to no air play, and less promotion (Fugazi is a great example).
This was a Costco ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7i5CQVfmx-0
My introduction to their Sriracha was in 1994, when the Puerto Rican cook at the Italian restaurant I worked at sent me to Stop and Shop for the "rooster".
Till hosing their relationship with Underwood Ranch (their sole provider of chili's) this was the only product in the marketplace (much like ketchup was always Heinz for a time). Absolute market dominance wrecked over not honoring your handshake deal with your ONLY supplier.
The latest batches by them are green, and no one wants them. The underwood version of the product is taking over --- it has a giant dragon on the bottle now, and what I look for now rather than the rooster.
I’ve had half the mind to just try my own hand at game dev again.
Or Google's low ranking of their content
Relying on third-party ranking of whatever is a clear indicator of lack of effort.
Forums, search engines, social media, and link aggregators are all third parties with their own ranking. Nobody outside of a handful of small-web hobbyists have put a "cool links" section into a website since 1997.
The answer to your question is: same as we always did before! Do you talk to friends? Colleagues? Family? You definitely chat with us here on HN. All of these people share things with you constantly.
There's a funny obsession in tech circles to gather all the information they can as quick as possible. I much prefer to optimize for the quality of information I'm ingesting.
When I started using the internet, if I asked someone what the internet was I was unlikely to get any answer at all. It was new. I had to define it for myself. Ask a 6 year old what the internet is. It’s YouTube. TikTok. Roblox. Experiences that are designed to keep them there. It is obviously more difficult for an individual to engage with the open web than it ever has been (for those with access at all).
Ignorance isn't the point. The issue is that it's your responsibility to stop them. the buck always stops at "I". Are they just going to stop themselves? Is your neighbor going to stop them for you? If so, why should she if you don't?
As Kant said, enlightenment is getting out of your self inflicted tutelage. When is it self inflicted? When you have the reason but lack the courage to act without direction from someone else.
Yes, there's influencers and lobbies but the solutions are still one search away. Even Google doesn't hide the alternatives from you. And sure we can force feed every American veggies and force install linux on their computers but that'd defeat the point.
It’s very easy. If you’re a producer, you maintain a separate presence outside the walled platforms. If you’re a consumer, you look outside the walled platform for content.
I want to try one day. Steam's pricing parity adds friction to that, though. I can't reward people for venturing to a place where they own their software, and that seems to be the only real way to move many.
You can still download it for free outside of Steam.
If I make a Sonic fan game and Sega is like, you can keep it online, but just not on Steam, that’s nice.
In this situation you still have the option of playing it on Steam for a modest price
The alternative is the Nintendo route…
If megacorps would stop being stuck up their own ass and completely irrational about how they exercise their IP rights, they would actually be able to benefit massively from allowing their fan communities to flourish. The status quo doesn't have to be this shitty, and we don't necessarily need to give credit to companies who meet the incredibly low bar of "not Nintendo".
Atari is very kind to say you can keep distributing a fan game, just not on a commercial storefront.
I don’t expect to see Sonic Fan games on Steam anytime soon. Even though Sega is one of the best publishers in this regard.
Now if OpenTDD said no , we’re leaving it on Steam for free ,Atari could probably contact Valve to get it delisted.
A compromise is not a loss. I’ve downloaded tons of applications and games without Steam holding my hand and somehow I’m ok. Although I do wish sandboxing solutions with better gpu support existed
It isn't kind hearted. Them trying to shut down openttd would lead to a gigantic clusterfuck that would hurt their sales. This is them trying to remove a direct competitor to them releasing a new game as much as possible, without generating community backlash - to maximise profits
These companies are not our friends
It may have been "screwed over" if there was no access to the oss game. But you can still download the game from their website. They just do not want that these appear as competitors in steam/gog platforms, so they bundled the oss version. Both sides thought this was a reasonable resolution. Thus I don't see "screwing over" here.
This is, at worst, a morally-neutral compromise that's far better than any worst-case scenario
This argument is like "you buy a McDonald's then realize there is a burger king across the road. What do you do?" Yes one is a clone of the other. But you don't get to just bulldoze the burger king.
But let's suppose I am Atari and I have for some reason proceeded with buying said abandonware without doing my research. Upon discovering OpenTTD, I would hire the guy behind OpenTTD to work on a commercial version, keeping OpenTTD free to play but perhaps with some cool monetized expansion pack that would not have been possible without giving the developer the funding they need to work on it. That way I am making an investment in actually adding value to the game, and rewarding the person who kept it alive and in turn earning community goodwill, instead of investing in a shortsighted attempt to collect rent that backfires massively.
> commercial version
> monetized expansion
It is not clear to me whether turning (future evolutions of) OpenTTD commercial and monetising it is a preferable scenario for its community.
I'd note it also doesn't need to be done in a way that deprives players of any free future evolution. Paradox has a nice model for their games where they release expansion packs, where about half the content is part of a free update to the base game and half the content is paid. That would be perfectly suited for a case like this.
I then go "well why re-release this ancient game running in an emulator, when this exists?" and ask the core team of OpenTTD if they want to monetize their steam/GOG releases now that I can licence out the TTD IP to them and remove any remaining legal ambiguity (and recoup my """investment""" via revenue sharing).
And if they don't I take it as a learning experience (to do my homework before I buy IPs) and release my TTD-in-an-emulator on steam and GOG knowing full well that its probably not going to generate many sales. Maybe I add "hey just so you know there's this really cool modern source port you can get for free..." to the description and hope that I can generate some sales off of good boy points.
That's pretty cool of them.
It's absurd that some company can buy up and profit from thirty-year-old formerly-abandonware, and that society have been collectively browbeaten into believing in the notion of “““intellectual property””” at all.
No, they don't. They own the game data, and the original game engine. They don't own the reimplemented Open Source game engine.
OpenTTD did not have to do anything here. It sounds like they had a very positive interaction with Atari, in which Atari is providing them with some support and collaboration, and in exchange for that, OpenTTD agreed to formalize the requirement for "you need to own the original game data" by having people on game stores purchase the original game through them before getting OpenTTD through them.
That seems like a pretty reasonable approach. It should be held up as a good model for collaboration. But it shouldn't be treated as "they have every right to [demand a] cease and desist".
So it'd be pretty much impossible to claim the engine came about as a clean room implementation. And of course, even if maybe they could win a court case (honestly don't think they could) the mere threat of one would likely make openttd quit.
I don't have the impression that OpenTTD encouraged or sanctioned obtaining those assets illegitimately. They talked about how to extract them from the original game that you owned.
To what extent did they copy "appearance" other than supporting the use of the original assets?
It is certainly possible that they didn't scrupulously maintain clean hands, but I wouldn't automatically assume that.
Back when OpenTTD first released, it was a decompile (?) of TTD that loaded the assets of the game itself. This was... legally dubious, since reverse engineering.
But over time they Ship of Theseus'd the game - all code rewritten from assembly to C/C++ (I don't know), open source asset packs, etc. It's still the same base game, same feel, etc but nothing of the original code or assets remain.
I don't know enough about IP law etc to judge whether Atari would have any leg to stand on in a court of law, but it would be Complicated to say the least.
Or is it just the case that the project maintainers got paid off?
I get that it's not the same Atari as it was 30 years ago. But I liken it to you being a Beatles cover band and the estate of John Lennon reaches out to you, you're going to treat them with some sort of respect.
While OpenTTD is open source, it's basis is really that the original game was reverse-engineered, originally using the original assets, and then rebuilt.
Also all the map data etc is owned by Atari, so you need to have a 'genuine' copy to access all the levels etc.
Try creating a 1:1 dupe of a Hermes bag or a Rolex and see how their legal team reacts (even if you call it an OpenBirk)
- Chip's Challange and custom levels pack
- Freedoom+Blasmepher for Doom/Heretic
- LibreQuake
- Supertux2
- Oolite
- Kgoldminner/XScavenger with level sets
- Frozen Bubble
- Any X11/console/9front sokoban clone. Everyone reuses the same level set over and over.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Out of the two claims, the only one that made it to appeals court was about whether it was fair use for Bleem to use screenshots of PS1 games to advertise its emulator (which was compatible with those games). The Ninth Circuit decided it was. But that's not relevant here.
The other claim was more relevant, as it was an unfair competition claim that apparently had something to do with Bleem's reimplementation of the PS1 BIOS. But the district court's record of the case doesn't seem to be available online, and the information I was able to find online was vague, so I don't know what exactly the facts or legal arguments were on that claim. Without an appeal it also doesn't set precedent.
If there were a lawsuit over OpenTTD, it would probably be for copyright infringement rather than unfair competition, and it would probably focus more on fair use and copyrightability. For fair use, it matters how much something is functional versus creative. The PS1 BIOS is relatively functional, but a game design and implementation are highly creative. On the other hand, despite being creative, game mechanics by themselves are not copyrightable. So it might come down to the extent to which OpenTTD's code was based on the reverse-engineered original code, as opposed to being a truly from-scratch reimplementation of the same mechanics. Visual appearance would also be relevant. Oracle v. Google would be an important precedent.
1. OpenTTD is not a clean room rewrite. It started by disassembling the original game and manually converting to C++ on a piecemeal basis.
2. As the game was updated, sure lots of this code has been rewritten. Almost certainly the majority. But has all of it been legally rewritten? Ehh... much less clear.
This sort of process has generally been held to produce a derived work of whatever you're cloning, even if the final result no longer contains original code, hence why clean room reverse engineering even became a thing in the first place.
It's probably fuzzy enough at this stage that you could have a long expensive drawn out legal battle about it (and I suspect we'll see at least one for some other project in the coming years with the recent trend of "I had AI rewrite this GPL project to my MIT licensed clone"). Would OpenTTD win? Who knows. Could OpenTTD afford it? Certainly not.
I'm not sure if look and feel of a game like Transport Tycoon can be copyrighted, but I wouldn't like to be against it.
(I remember buying Transport Tycoon from I think Beatles, in Altrincham. I clearly remember riding on the front seat of the bus upstairs on my way to Flixton back in 1994 reading the manual)
You can see the same effect if someone were to make a yellow short guy with metal claws and regeneration as a character.
You can retype someone’s book with your keyboard, it’s still not yours.
https://osgameclones.com/
Maybe you all realize how much brainwashed from corporations yall actually are.
https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/assets/articlePDFs/v03/03HarvJL...
All of them totally legal reimplementing either prior look and feel and functionality.
I'm no expect, but Chris Sawyer style games certainly provided a unique overall impression to me. Whether it needs to be a registered design or not I couldn't say, but it's not going to be cheap to find out.
More recent battles have relied on Trademark and Patent law rather than Copyright, but "Look and Feel" is still a legal grey area
What seemed majority at the time was the idea of some collaboration/partnership and monetary exchange.
I think its a good lesson in communication, especially when you have a dedicated community. Transparency is welcome.
Regarding Atari and "their rights", there hasn't been an Atari for way too long and the IP was passed between companies left and right without additive value to users. I expect transport tycoon to be another cash grab, but happy to be surprised for the better.
Or the OpenTTD guys were not the best communicators. Considering it's the OpenTTD creators live at the intersection of the groups 'programmers' and 'adults who like to play with train sets' it wouldn't be a stretch.
All in all I think this collaborative approach is very much the preferred outcome.
All those people saying 'the open web is dead' and 'people don't download from websites anymore' are exaggerating imo.
Chris Sawyer as creator for example is known to have particular opinions on this as I recall, and if you e.g. look over to film making there's also a hot debate over preserving original artistic intent and original creations over later remasters. OpenTTD is more than a maintenance upgrade, it's a continuation and a different game.
Honestly I think it's probably just OK what Atari has done here. Monetizing the original assets is well in their rights both legally and morally (especially considering e.g. royalities to Chris), OpenTTD remains available everywhere, they're monetarily supporting OpenTTS, gamers will find it.
Note that once a commercial company decides to ship a FOSS project, they also are much more invested in potentially controlling its direction to different ends. This setup keeps OpenTTD community-run and independent, free to make decisions independent of a commercial agenda. This also feels worth protecting.
When you get to the last, you can definitely see how the original creator/artists could disagree.
That sound indistinguishable from being pressured.
This seems like a perfectly reasonable compromise to me.
Changes to OpenTTD Distribution on Steam - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47381746 - March 2026 (131 comments)
its not really possible for the rights holder to compete with a free product, since they arent harvesting data or oxploiting the userbase, so they need to charge. and openTTD getting a cut of the money really does show that this is fully collaborative
I think I'd pay for a Windows License if it means I get official support for Windows apps on Linux (provided the support is indeed good).
Some games have a good replayfactor. Transport Tycoon Deluxe was nice in this regard; the spirit should be retained so younger folks can play it.
> Atari approached us to explain their plans for the Transport Tycoon Deluxe re-release, and what it might mean for OpenTTD.
> we understood that a compromise would be needed to balance Atari’s commercial interests […] against the availability of a free, well-developed evolution of the game.
Sounds to me like you were pressured by Atari to make these changes.
This seems to be the simplest compromise, and allows OpenTTD to continue existing without too many problems from Atari, so people don't want to make waves.
Not sure why so many commenters are failing to grasp this.
No, fuck 'em. They had nothing to do with developing the game, and in a sane copyright structure a thirty-year-old work would be public domain by now.
OpenTTD started as an effort to translate the original game’s assembly into higher level code.
It was not a clean room implementation. The original code was used as a base.
You are not wrong. But alas we don't have that. ANd in the reality we live in this collaboration is way better than the alternative.
Is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?
But what I can imagine has very little to do with what actually happens.
You're not my mom...
Good luck with all that