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Comment by noodlesUK | Hacker News Reader

It’s so interesting to see what didn’t quite make it into such culturally important works. It’s a shame that for most classic games, the source code will never be released. I wish that after a while, and things were no longer commercially viable, code would be released. I get that’s kinda how copyright was meant to work with books and similar, but the code is never published, so nobody has it to preserve it for posterity...

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> It’s a shame that for most classic games, the source code will never be released. I wish that after a while, and things were no longer commercially viable, code would be released.

Unfortunately, many game companies lost the source code for their classic games years ago. They couldn't release it even if they wanted to.

One of the big surprises coming from this leak is simply the fact that Nintendo's source code still exists. The company seems to have been very thorough in archiving material related to its older games.

I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo has the source code for most everything they've made. You don't become a 150 year old company without fastidious bookkeeping.

Now if they'd just pay the emulator people a bucket of cash to make officially supported emulators that run on the Switch and all future hardware (without having to rebuy the titles), they'd make so much money they'll be around for the next 300 years.

> pay the emulator people a bucket of cash

> without having to rebuy the titles

How does this lead to making "so much money"? Purely from hardware sales?

> How does this lead to making "so much money"? Purely from hardware sales?

Yeah, hardware margins for gaming systems are often not great. The point is that you also have to buy games for it. Similar to how printers are priced (it's the ink that makes the money).

Exactly, and if you can continue to play all your old games on your new system, you're probably less inclined to buy a lot of new games - probably buy one or two (otherwise why bother getting a new system?), but if you couldn't play your old games on it, you may initially buy a few more new games to justify the system purchase etc.

Nintendo fans aren't like that though.

They'll buy the new releases. And as a sample size of 1, I'd probably pay $10-$20 for each classic game if I knew it had indefinite portability. Same way I'm happy to pay for classic books.

I missed Metroid prime when it came out, and there's no real way for me to go back to it without getting my GameCube from my parents and finding a disk on eBay.

Just think of all of the kids who've heard about all of these classic games, love the latest version, and would gladly dive into the rest of the series, if it were available.

People are still getting excited because the source code for a 25 year old game has finally been stolen and leaked. 2401

I assume the suggestion isn't that Nintendo should give the games away. Just that if you buy a game on the Switch you shouldn't have to buy it again when you upgrade to their next console.

Yeah, I got that, my point is more that it takes away a potential recurring revenue stream for the sake of maybe a slight boost in software sales right now (I doubt there are a massive number of people who would suddenly purchase a whole bunch of virtual console games right now if it was announced they'd transfer over to all future Nintendo consoles)

Isn't that exactly the point of Steam though? Single, highly transferable library.

I certainly know that I'd be loading up if they made everything available in perpetuity.

And thinking of how many people want to get get into a series but simply can't because there's no real way for them to. Nintendo isn't really even doing VC this generation. So they're turning to emulation, if they're technical enough.

Correct.

I won't buy virtual console stuff because it won't carry over.

I'd happily buy their whole catalog if I knew it was mine forever.

Many newer games are still built on top of that source code to a certain degree as well. I remember recently reading about how Bungie built the engine for Halo 1 and pieces of it have been used in every single game in the series since then.

As proven by the emulation scene, access to the source code isn't a requirement to preserve games.

Edit: Could someone downvoting explain what is wrong with my comment? We would all love to have source code of everything because that's what we like to dig into and hack on, it's also a fact that it isn't required if the goal is preservation.

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