Nice news and all but seriously, where is Rage? Just really odd that has never shown up.

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Quoting: rea987Among the old id Tech 4 titles, only Doom 3 and Doom 3 BFG received source code and source port releases. Quake 4 and Prey got Doom 3 source code based engine reimplantation made by the community. ETQW, Wolfenstein (2009) and Brink received no source code release or a modern port.

I was aware the Quake 4 port was largely playable but how is the Prey implementation? Has anyone made fully polished versions of these?

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I am fine with such things if the option to play vanilla is offered on startup, not removed or hidden in a menu. Otherwise it is not preservation. As I have said before, Nightdive doesn't preserve anything, they simply port them to modern Windows and consoles. And like ports of old, they change a bunch. People need to know it is not an accurate experience.

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Improved maps throughout the game

Oh here we go again...

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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]

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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]

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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.

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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.

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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]

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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.

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