I’ve heard that the Tiberian Sun and Firestorm source code were also lost.

To this day I haven’t found a game that replicates the magic of 1999 era of RTS..

Video Game asset and source control retention was _terrible_. Hell, it's still terrible.

Prior to ~2010 we were simply deleting source code and assets for finished projects; either because they weren't owned by the developer due to a publishing deal, or because the developers didn't want to reuse their garbage code. Same follows for assets, often they were owned by the publisher and not the developer, but if the developer did happen to own them they'd rarely see reuse in future projects. And publishers didn't catch on to the value of data retention until remakes started to make serious money.

Happens. Even the moon landing footage was lost. (That’s why the famous video is so crap quality - it’s not the primary feed)

The more you look around the more commonly you'll start seeing things like this. The RS3 OSRS split itself happened because Jagex recovered their lost source code and was suddenly able to do it.

> How the hell could they LOSE the source code to that game? All copies of it.

I wrote a streaming video platform in the very early 2000s. It worked great, if you were on ISDN, or at my house with a whopping 256kbps cable modem! All lovingly hand-crafted in PHP3 with a Postgres backend. Lots of I want to say ffmpeg but it might have been shelling out to mencoder back then.

Gone.

Along with probably a couple of hundred hours of footage both unedited and raw camera captures, of various training videos for the oil industry, Scottish Women's Football League matches - they were very forward-thinking and because no TV channel would show their games they wanted to post the match highlights on their website, so RealPlayer to the rescue I guess. All gone.

I didn't own the servers, the company I worked for did. When the company went tits, they wanted to make sure that none of "their IP" was leaving the organisation, so I wiped stuff off my personal machines and handed over all the camera and master tapes.

The servers got wiped for sale and the tapes went in a skip. They'd paid a fucking fortune for all of that, but ultimately when they decided they'd had enough of that venture the hardware went for scrap prices and the soft assets were wiped, not really worth anything.

Who would want to post on a website where you could upload and share videos, upvote or downvote them, comment on them, and tell all your friends?

It's all gone now. I wish I'd just stolen it.

Nobody said every copy was lost, they said the copies in whatever repository Westwood handed over to EA were lost. There might still be a copy on one of the individuals involved in development's machines/backups/etc.

Back in the days there were not a lot of copies to start with. No laptops, no BYOD, no cloud servers. A developer making a copy would involve buying an expensive large drive (for the time) and sneaking it at work to steal it, not worth the risk. The few hard drives containing the code were archived in a room after release and forgotten.

Panzer Dragoon Saga is also lost. Probably a lot of games like that.

It was an era where Team Foundation Server was just oops corrupting entire codebases

Part of it I imagine is because Westwood made the game and then got bought up and shutdown under EA. Asset tracking would be a mess.

Other part of it is most studios didn't imagine a use for old games in the future. So they weren't archived properly. World of Warcraft original source code was mostly lost and that game sold incredibly well and the company stayed in business. More modern studios are thinking more about remasters, remakes and archiving their work now so it's mostly a problem with older titles.

The same happened with Silent Hill 2 and 3.[1]

The industry's treatment of its works was pretty horrible back in the day. Not even 25 years earlier, developers had to fight to be credited in games. Lessons take a while to learn, apparently.

[1] https://gamingbolt.com/konami-lost-the-source-code-for-silen...

Blizzard oldest source code for WoW is from 1.12 (the last patch before BC). They don't have 1.0-1.11

Source code to some masterpieces of 1990s software (such as Impression for RISC OS) were left to rot on the hard disk of a machine in the basement of the country mansion where they were created.

Hope someone somewhere still has the source for MicroProse’s Shandalar.

companies shut down and lose stuff I guess. Icewind Dale 2 another example

I think the campaigns of StarCraft II are amazing (never played Broodwar unfortunately). However I kinda agree that StarCraft's success hurt the RTS genre, because it's just so freaking good. 15 years since release and there are still tournaments played, it's fun to watch and projects like Stormgate have a really hard time, because SC2 is the bar and it's super difficult to reach. In terms of unit legibility, responsiveness, balance, etc. The bad thing is, it's not an approachable game at all, it mainly is interesting in the competitive/eSport scene.

If I watch YT videos a la "New RTS games 2025/2026" there are very interesting projects which give me hope that SC2 is not the end of RTS games.

Genres also come and go. Arena shooters are also out for a long time, compared to 95-2005. Or point and click adventure games. I think there are a huge amount of players who are genre agnostic, or, not even "gamers", and just jump from one type of fun to the next.

DoW 2 is great, DoW 3 on the other hand…

We still play Company of Heroes 1 as a LAN party game, after almost two decades. It's interesting to see the graphics and gameplay hold up pretty well.

It was sad to see the slow and steady enshittification with 2 and 3. The online community is pretty toxic too.

It's a shame the campaign of RA3 was boring. They got the theme and cutscenes right, but the campaign missions were rather slow, generic and forgettable.

It's the opposite of C&C3, which had a good campaign but the theme was a step back from the scifi of Tiberian Sun. Especially the GDI/NOD units were way less futuristic, and the alien ones were a bit too similar to each other in style. The cutscenes were also mostly boring compared to earlier games.

If I recall correctly, the expansion pack for C&C3 was much more interesting in these aspects, but the gameplay suffered.

"I'm escaping to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism,

barely holds laughter back and takes a break

SPACE!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1Sq1Nr58hM

Absolutely! I don't have time to play a RTS campaign, but I watched the RA3 story cutscenes and they are the top of the genre.

"I'm escaping to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism... SPAAACE!"

A more innocent time tbh

Doesn't RA2 check serials over network?

I do remember having to install IPX to play over LAN.

I agree in general.

but on a tangent, just wanted to add how impressed in was at super Mario 3D world on the Nintendo switch. Perfect balance between good looking and pragmatic 3D graphics adding up to real platformer feel.

Couldn't agree more. To me 3D environment in games is frustrating to control / move around while 2D is straightforward. And I truly don't care about camera movement. Games are meant to be fun, not a chore with adjusting camera all the time.

Yeah, I think new games in style of the old Warcraft games would be a huge success.

> That wasn't the case when I checked the site a few hours ago, the autopopulated link is new.

Sorry, didn't know. That's very strange, I've never had that in all my times playing Chronodivide. Just in case the URL field is empty for someone: https://archive.org/download/red-alert-2-multiplayer/Red-Ale...

Does every engine need to support every game in a series?

I think it's fine for OpenRA to focus on what they enjoy most, and others to cover other games.

It was kind of a blast but a couple of newly introduced bugs this year or late last year totally killed it for me.

Can, use Waterfox instead.

The bottleneck is webgl. I'm not sure why exactly but firefox is pretty well known to have significantly worse webgl performance than can be achieved with chrome.

Man, what a waste of resources. It'd be funny if the client side just did a hash of the "uploaded" files, told the server the hash, and then the server can compare the hash and use the server copy of the assets, to save bandwidth. But as "What colour are your bits" (1) say, that'd still probably not be legal.

Oops, it's a browser based game, you still need the assets on the client side, i.e. in your local memory... never mind

(1) https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

Now you can run it on more platforms.

The point is they don’t get sued for distributing game assets they don’t own.

If they could distribute them, they would.

Point taken, but there is an answer to your questions. Cross platform compatibility

They really should've added the demo files.

[dead]

Game mechanics are not considered copyrightable[1]. If you had a clean room implementation with your own significantly different assets, it would be allowed.

However, the exact definitions of "significantly different" and "assets" is where things start to get fuzzy. While you could definitely make a very similar RTS game, exactly how similar can you get? EA doesn't own "military-themed RTS", but they probably do own "Soviets vs Allies with about 5 different unit types, air transports, and tesla coils." Getting even more fuzzy, are unit abilities considered assets, or game mechanics? It'd have to be worked out in court.

My gut feeling is these clone engines would probably lose in court. I think the specific expression of the general game mechanics being cloned here probably would constitute infringement. But there isn't much upside to the IP owners to pursue enthusiastic hobbyists cloning a 20+ year old game in a non-commercial way, so they let it slide.

[1] "Although Amusement World admitted that they appropriated Atari's idea, the court determined that this was not prohibited, because copyright only protects the specific expression of an idea, not the idea itself." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari,_Inc._v._Amusement_World...

IIRC if you make entirely new assets you're good to go. OpenTTD (Open source version of Transport Tycoon Deluxe) has its own custom made assets, but can also be used with the original if you own them.

https://www.openttd.org

Not sure it's ever been proven definitively in court, though. And if you "made" custom assets that were exactly like the original ones only with a 1px color difference or something I'm sure you'd fall foul of it. What counts as different "enough" is always debatable.

https://freedoom.github.io/ does that for the still proprietary DOOM assets. Though the DOOM engine itself is open source, so a slight different situation than Command and Conquer.