It's an interesting opinion from a person who created SDL, and we didn't have most of these games for Linux without his project. Everyone can agree or disagree.

It would be an interesting opinion for him, but unfortunately I meant Scott Draeker. I got my S names mixed up.

https://web.archive.org/web/20020202221402/http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/01/24/2118235 [External Link]

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: amataiIsn't GNULactic/Konquest a Linux exclusive ?

Also available on Mac apparently, so technically not.

https://apps.kde.org/konquest/ [External Link]

This is cheating, but...

https://cygwin.com/packages/summary/konquest.html [External Link]

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: gbudnyThe commercial games helped many of us keep using this system, and I wish it were a much bigger community. You can see huge communities of retro users constantly talking about games for Windows, Mac, Amiga, and Atari. etc. So many incredible companies sacrifice their time and risk their money to help Linux users play commercial games.

The main issue is that Linux has never really had any exclusives. For most of our history we have been a very small fish in a large pond, so the majority of our commercial titles have been ports or developed cross-platform. Meanwhile, our independent games have largely been free and open source (Tux Racer, SuperTux, Tux games in general), which is objectively great, but it does mean that most of these also saw releases on Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, and your toaster.

The only ones that didn't were either games that were never popular enough to begin with (and so were forgotten regardless), or titles that were directly tied to Linux/Unix only libraries such as the early X11 games (which were mostly clones of arcade games anyway). Simply put, there has never been a reason by and large where you HAD to run Linux in order to experience a given game.

Meanwhile, Mac OS had a shareware scene even during the darkest of times for that platform, through the likes of Ambrosia Software and similar (most notably early Bungie), not to mention all the amateur games made in Hypercard. The Amiga meanwhile had developers that adopted it when it was genuinely a leading game platform (and had many releases where the Amiga version was considered the superior version to the DOS release), and even in its twilight its attempts to keep up with the PC were still unique, such as Doom-clones like Gloom and Alien Breed 3D.

Loki's Sam Latinga even touched upon this when he admitted that if he were to do it all over again he would have developed original Linux games instead of ports. Maybe he was right.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

The final complication is that the Linux version of Terroid appears to have been freeware ("Download the full game for Linux"), so one could argue that game was not commercial when it comes to our platform. Similar to Maelstrom which started out as shareware for Mac OS in 1992 but was brought to Linux for free in 1995 by Sam Latinga when he was given the source code, and later became fully free and open source. Nevertheless, Terroid seems the best candidate for our list in 1997.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

So according to MobyGames the game Terroid was released for DOS in 1996 but ported to Windows and Linux in 1997, if that counts (which since you counted SimCity, it should). Game was shareware.

https://www.mobygames.com/game/89740/terroid/ [External Link]
http://www.dngames.de/old/terroid.html [External Link]
https://web.archive.org/web/19990219172316/http://www.spinne.com/x/games/terroid/ [External Link]
https://web.archive.org/web/19970805172714/http://www.informatik.uni-oldenburg.de/~miha/baller.html [External Link]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksJBDfCoye0&t=12s [External Link]

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Page mentions a shareware arcade game called Last Defender by Wouter Scholten, but this old LSM listing says it was first listed in November 1996 so close but no cigar.

https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/docs/LSM/LSM.1999-08-30#:~:text=Last%20Defender%20demo%20Version:%201.0.5%20Entered%2Ddate:%2019NOV96%20Description [External Link]

https://web.archive.org/web/19990218154129/http://www.spinne.com/x/games/ldefender/ [External Link]

Unfortunately ibiblio does not seem to still preserve the demo, so hopefully its on an old CD somewhere.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: gbudnyDid you find any commercial games for Linux published in 1997?

It's the only year when I didn't find any commercial games released for Linux. I hope it's not true because it would be depressing to wait for over a year for Quake 2 and Ultima Online:

1994 Doom, Doom 2
1995 Abuse, SimCity
1996 Inner Worlds, Quake
1997 Nothing?
1998 Quake 2, Ultima Online

Maybe someone remembers it.

This officially bothers me. Can't really say for commercial, but I did dig up the original 1997 incarnation of the Game Tome: https://web.archive.org/web/19970806044626/http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/tlau/tome/byname.html [External Link]

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: gbudnyI think it would be better if Macmillan Digital Publishing were also a publisher for Quake 3 for Linux in 1999. We probably get a set of rpms packages on the CD, which is weird and problematic on many Linux distributions. On the other hand, Loki could survive as a company if it didn't publish this game.

It is true that we would have gotten Quake 3 eventually anyway, even if it took half a decade before the source code was released.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: apocalyptech. The suits tend to see modern generative systems as a shortcut to Increased Productivity™ and they might just be assuming that this is the magical tech that's gonna turn a struggling company into a thriving one.

In this particular instance of a banner ad that goes up for only two weeks, spending ten seconds is objectively more productive than spending an hour, even if the results are worse and it is not great branding.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Marathon from Bungie will run just fine via Aleph One, just not what the hell that is supposed to be...

View this comment - View article - View full comments