I'm always happy to see a speedrunner decompile the game they're running. I've always thought it was an underappreciated part of understanding a game.
But I wish companies would just release their games' original source code after a while. Monkey Island is almost 30 years old, and people have already reverse-engineered it, so they won't be losing too many sales by releasing it. And for Monkey Island specifically it's not a case of losing the source - the original devs gave a copy of the engine and game source to the Video Game History Foundation[^]. But us outsiders will never get to play with it :(
Well the post you are commenting on is the original developer of both the game and SCUMM, so it is not really a decompilation. That said it would be cool to get a commented version of the original code if that exist.
Also the tasvideos forum is nice to lean about games on though they are not much for point and click games.
As a younger dev I often dreamed of devs releasing the source code to ancient games so that I could learn from it, but now that I know how corporate works I've made my peace that it will happen rarely or never.
I bet that devs in a company like LucasArts these days need to wait for weeks on corporate to give permission to use a alternate email client, just imagine coming up with a proposal to abandon copyright claim on something. It just can't happen, you would have a very hard time even finding one single person inside the company who might actually have the authority and pull to greenlight it.
A proposal to open source will go to an SVP (or compatible) who will cover their ass by sending it to legal. They in turn will cover their asses and demonstrate their perceived worth by enumerating every possible risk however small. The SVP puts it in their "don't touch" pile.
Also, nobody within the corporation really benefits from the open sourcing. "I hopefully won some goodwill from nostalgic players" is not a thing you can put into your employee evaluation packet.
Fun fact, for a charity event Introversion released the source code for a collection of their old games. But they are also the opposite of big corporate.
Carmack was the textbook definition of rock star programmer and had a sizable portion of company ownership when they released doom/quake code, kinda hard to emulate that as a cog in the machine
You can study the reverse engineered code of a lot game engines. ScummVM is a massive collection of reverse engineered game engines, with the occasional donation of original game code from kind developers.
Considering how easy it is to emulate Graphic Adventures thanks to ScummVM, I doubt releasing the source code would impact the sales in any shape or form. People that want to play for free already have the easiest life possible. I think it's one of those cases where emulating is as much convenient as grabbing a copy on Steam.
You rise a good point. After X years releasing the code of many things would benefit the public so much without hurting at all the owners, are there movements about this concept?
ScummVM is not emulation, it's primarily a collection of reimplementations of game engines based on reverse engineering, with the occasional donation of original source code from the developers.
So with ScummVM you can study how the original SCUMM virtual machine worked, but to see the original SCUMM scripts before they were compiled we have to rely on the kindness of Ron Gilbert :)
Emulation doesn't mean just hardware emulation even if some die-hards might want it to. Certainly not in colloquial usage.
ScummVM in particular started out as an interpreter for SCUMM bytecode, emulating the original interpreter that ships with the games. It's as much as an emulator for those games as WinE is a Windows Emulator - that is, saying so will make some people upset but being upset does not make them right.
I actually think most proprietary code should be open sourced eventually. There needs to be really good reason not to, and I don't see those applying to most code.
The only "demand" I have is that software products be released as open source instead of just silently dropped out of support and forgotten about. I'm not saying people should be forced to maintain code forever or something. Release the code, let whoever still needs it fork it and maintain it as they please. That way, everybody wins. The original authors don't have to maintain this legacy software forever, or harm their reputation by dumping it. And people don't lose access to things they depend on.
Games and game servers are an excellent example of where this is an easy win win situation.
I would contribute to keep legacy things I love working, but generally I'm not allowed to at the moment. But I have contributed in the past by buying the products...
Remind me again how developers win by making their old games more accessible, just so people can play their old games for free instead of buying new games. Because that would be one of the wins in the win win situation you claim.
In reality, if releasing code was no work, then at best it would be a neutral/win situation. But that’s not reality either, it is work to release code. So it’s a lose/win situation. They lose and you win. They aren’t going to make the effort you demand, just so they lose. In the real world people want something back for their effort and otherwise they are going to put that effort into something that will get them something in return.
But it is pretty soothing to know that you would certainly contribute, if only it wasn’t so hard. I’m sure the other people that you demand contributions from don’t experience your hardships.
I'm not sure why you're being so rude. Maybe you don't maintain or release your old games or software and you're offended. But in that case you're not making a strong argument for your position through veiled insults.
The rest of your argument is resting on the view that not maintaining or releasing legacy code is perfectly ok regardless of the circumstances, not arguing for it.
Your claim that people playing their old games for nostalgia would meaningfully cut into sales of new games is completely unfounded, and frankly absurd. If that's a real issue for you, then your new game probably just isn't as good. By the nature of the pace at which video games improve, newer games inherently appeal more to younger generations.
The idea that releasing code is so much work is mostly due to licencing quirks. If instead your licence was set up specifically to do this, you could even have it happen automatically.
And let me remind you that often the biggest developers are the ones who don't do this, and smaller ones are the ones who do.
As for your veiled insults, let me just say that I'm not sure what you think a "demand" is, but you might want to look it up.
I’m not saying it’s so much work, I’m saying it’s more work than not doing it. Nobody owes you that work, especially not when you offer nothing in return.
What you are doing is qualifying the work someone else has to do as easy and not a big deal, but when you have to do something it’s just too hard. The concerns of others are petty and invalid and you know better, only your concerns are real.
I find software archeology like this very interesting.
My understanding is that this lispy looking language, we will call it scummL, compiles to a stack based virtual machine which is what the game executable would run. scummvm is a third party opensource reverse engineering project to replicate the virtual machine so that games written to it can be played in current execution environments.
Are there any compilers for scummL known to exist in the wild? I found scummC but it is more C-ish in specification.
There are no original compilers of SCUMM script available online as far as I know, although certainly Ron Gilbert and Aaron Giles and probably some other LucasArts programmers have the originals.
I don't think there were even any samples of the original scripts online when ScummC was developed so it can be forgiven for not matching the original format :)
What you call "scummL" isn't even publicly described in any other way than by the kind of snippets like in this article. You can find some more in GDC slides, but that's pretty much it.
Highly recommend this channel for well-researched and entertaining mini-documentaries on adventure game speedrunning: https://www.youtube.com/@OneShortEye
I played some text-based adventure game which also had graphics.
I wish I could remember what it was. It was cool for the early 90's, sort of fantasy-horror haunted house kind of game.
I recall finding a bug on a replay of the game, where I accidentally typed a command one room early in the house, and it immediately went to the end game screen. Apparently the bug was that at any time you could basically type something like, "Open the last door" and you would immediately finish the game.
That's got to be the fastest speedrun I've seen, just by virtue that the game intro was a lot shorter than Monkey Island.
OK, the one I am thinking of was definitely different.
But I definitely owned and played that second Hugo game!
I am going to have to dig into this tonight and see what I come up with.
ETA: It's also possible my memory is totally wrong. Or as well, that it was just some lone dev who barely got his game published. I definitely remember buying it from the bargain bin of crap PC games.
Nah, I have played that as an adult. It is not that.
I have been searching more, and my visual memory is pretty good (even for something 30+ years ago). Still have not found a dead ringer. Likely to be a CGA game.
Wow. that game is so difficult. I spent hours and hours on it in my youth and never got anywhere lol. I didn't know you could do it in 30 minutes though.
Of course speedrunners will know all the puzzles in advance. Which kinda defeats the purpose of such a game.
Reminds me of Grim Fandango. Any 90s adventure game is revealed to be very short with a guide.
Now when that game came out I had to go to the library for internet and pay 25 cents for each printed page or make a handwritten copy of gamefaqs...
Just to have at least one counterpoint in this thread, but I loved the ending. Much, much better, IMO, than a non-meta epic fight with LeChuck, for example.
I took it as a very interesting and profound discussion about the role of games and fantasy in our lives as adults after playing it from a different perspective as kids. The dialogs during the ending are very well thought and thought-provoking. The role of Elaine in it is special.
I loved the whole game, but the ending brought it to a complete new level for me. It’s probably something that I’ll want to play again a few years from now.
My recollection is that the negative reactions to Return mostly seem to come from the camp of "MI is a proper pirating adventure with some funny jokes in it", which you can kind of hazily reinterpret the first game as, and definitely Curse can be slotted into that. Like, there's a whole manosphere-they-ruined-my-heroes element going on with that interpretation, where Guybrush has experienced "Kirk Drift" and turned into a badass womanizer who can defeat LeChuck like some kind of cunning JoJo character.
But really, Ron Gilbert always wanted it to be critical and at least a bit deconstructive of all the pirate tropes: Guybrush never gets taken seriously as a pirate, the way in which he pirates is bizarre and unglamorous, and the dialogue follows a sort of knowing "NPC normalizes any choice the PC makes" railroading back into the puzzle gameplay. Gilbert just got more clear about doing that in the sequels, and I think Return is a great capstone to that.
After playing Thimbleweed park, it became clear to me that Ron's a huge fan of David Lynch, whose films often explore Buddhist or Hindu themes of reality as a dream we create inside our heads. I think that this theme appears in most of his games, and the endings of MI2 and Return are no different. When I finished MI2 as a teenager, I felt cheated too, but now as an adult that has spent a lot of time meditating and exploring eastern philosophy, I think there's a lot more to it than I could appreciate at that age.
He's made the ending he always wanted. The "secret of the monkey island" was supposed to be that it was all a park attraction all along and that was why there are so many anachronistic things in the game.
He already did the "it's a theme park" ending in MI2 and it was fine. Not tbh my favourite part, but fine in that context in that time. There was something about the new one which was appallingly "fuck you for still liking Monkey Island".
I couldn't bring myself to finish Return either. Which is a huge bummer, since the first couple games are near the very top of my list of favorite and most (personally) influential games ever. But the nostalgia tour and nonstop callbacks to prior games, rather than actual new content, didn't really do it for me.
The rules vary between games, but generally it's up to the community to decide what's allowed.
I'm not sure if I remember the details correctly, but I think a few months back there was a moist critical speedrun challenge where the game had to be patched using a third party tool in order to prevent crashes.
As long as the rules are clear and everyone is on a level playing field then it's fair.
Speed running games is an awesome hobby. I've been watching the community for over a decade and it's really amazing the creativity and skill speed runners demonstrate. When you get down to it high level speed running is really no different from sophisticated software testing--the best speed runners figure out bugs and how to exploit them for maximum speed. It's really a cool software development-adjacent sport IMHO.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. I think speed running is cool & I think creative testing is a great way of framing it. Actually, as a QA guy, I think some original speed runs would be the best portfolio pieces you could have on your resume.
But I wish companies would just release their games' original source code after a while. Monkey Island is almost 30 years old, and people have already reverse-engineered it, so they won't be losing too many sales by releasing it. And for Monkey Island specifically it's not a case of losing the source - the original devs gave a copy of the engine and game source to the Video Game History Foundation[^]. But us outsiders will never get to play with it :(
[^]: https://gamehistory.org/monkeyisland/