Hero Worship: A History Of Our Commercial Downloads Service

One thing we are proud of here at Infinite Frontiers is the downloads section for our website. As well as including our back catalogue of Amiga titles, the Agatron range from Tobias Richer, plus some new files we've created for the PC, we are quickly building up an impressive collection of titles that were once available commercially. Some of you might be wondering just how we've managed to achieve this...

We've seen a lot of websites around over the last few years dedicated to "abandonware". I won't go into too much detail here (as an article in the PC section covers it better), but basically these are game archives offering old titles that they claim have been abandoned and forgotten by their publishers and are no longer commercially viable. As such, they argue that if these games are no longer being sold and the publishers are not making money or marketing them, then they should be made available freely. A worthy campaign, but the majority of sites make assumptions about titles and decide that if it's old, it's legal for them to offer them. As you can imagine, no software houses agree with this...

One thing that struck me initially with our site was that we wanted to do everything above board and legally. We wanted to offer a selection of great games to people who may not have seen them originally, but most importantly, we wanted to make sure that we had the full backing of the copyright holders. One of the first problems we encountered was establishing just who the copyright holders were for each title. In many instances, publishers were either taken over by larger companies, or simply ceased trading. For some games, this has left the copyright in limbo, in others the copyright is with the authors - it all depended on the arrangements made at the time.

It wasn't something we planned to do from the offset, with our Downloads section intended just for our own work, but things just happened, and since then it's took on a life of its own, and a more personal meaning for myself which I'll come onto later on...

We started the section off by focusing on the Amiga. Not necessarily because the Amiga had a better selection of games to choose from, but our long history with the Amiga meant that we had better contacts in the Amiga industry which helped us to negotiate for games that little bit quicker. The only question then was how did we start?

The first game we tried to get was meant to be our first and only commercial game on the site! it was a game on the Amiga that was developed by a few friends of mine. One of the most popular racing games ever to grace the Amiga was the Mario Kart influenced XTreme Racing. I remember seeing this game from it's early stages and even remember seeing another game from the team that never made it past the prototype stage (a 3D first-person shooter called Dentaku-26). The idea to include the game came about when we remembered that it had been included freely on one of the Aminet CD-ROM collections. They had included a number of commercial titles on their collections, and it was clear that the commercial value of the game was no longer there.

Once we had decided to try and get the game, we had to track down the developers, Siltunna Software (as they were known back then). A quick search on Yahoo brought up their official website for their new company, Tuna Technologies, which was promoting their work as an independent developer specialising in Gameboy titles and fortuntately most of the original team were still there including the boss, Alex Amsel who I had known for a few years. A quick browse of the site came up with contact email addresses, postal addresses, and more importantly a contact phone number.

A quick phone call later to Alex Amsel and we had managed to get permission to include the game. As well as that, Alex was keen on being interviewed for the site some time in the future, so we're still working on that! Now we had clearance, all we had to do was find the game! There were two ways we did this - first, we found a website that had also been given permission to act as an official download source for the game, and not only was the game there for the Amiga, but also the game patch as well. We transferred these across to our server and as long as the user had a hard drive, it would be relatively simple to install the game. After that, we managed to source a copy of the original game and we were also able to present it on the site in it's original disk format.

Once we had our first game online, we were bitten by the download bug and we wanted more! The rest then followed pretty much a standard plan to secure more titles. Knowing that were plenty of abandonware sites on the net, we knew we wouldn't have any problems sourcing the software that we wanted to give away. The next step was to identify other games. Rather than doing a straight search on the net for abandonware, I tried something a little different using the keyword "legal" as well. This revealed a number of sites that were distributing titles on a range of formats all claiming to have permission. We made a note of these, and started approaching a number of publishers to clarify this, and see if we could do the same.

Also, we looked around online to look for old games publishers and developers to see if there were any companies giving their old titles away directly. We found a few, spent some time downloading plenty of these in preparation and started writing emails! At the time of writing this, I have approached about 30 companies and developers, and many have been really keen to work with us - it's better for them to have their games distributed with their backing than having their work pirated.

While we found information out about a number of titles from other sites, there are a lot here that we don't think are available on other sites legally - we've tried to source as much as we could that would be new to us so we can offer you a better selection. As I said, we've been lucky having a lot of industry contacts and with just a few phone calls, we've been able to get in touch with a lot of developers and publishers, and usually talking directly to the company directors!

Some companies are reluctant to offer their games freely for a number of reasons. One of the companies we approached early on (that we had a few personal links to) wasn't giving anyone permission as they were looking at using some of their back catalogue for hand held consoles and next-gen updates. Understandable really, as they don't want to harm sales by giving their games away. Saying that, we are on a waiting list so if they decide to release anything, you'll see it here first!

Others want to place certain conditions on their games being used. For every publisher, we offer a link to their website and we are happy to offer any promotional assistance we can. There are some that, for legal reasons, can't offer their games on any site other than their own so naturally we can't include these. Finally, some may have other concerns about the number of downloads or that they want people to visit their site. One such case was Distant Suns where the developer, Mike Smithwick, was happy for us to link to his site, but preferred giving people the option to sign up for his astronomy newsletter. What we managed to do with this was set up a script for the download button so that as well as downloading the program, you were taken to the Distant Suns site at the same time.

In other cases, we have been given the opportunity to get some games for the site but for a licence fee. These companies are reluctant to give download rights without charging as it could impair their efforts to block illegal download sites.

Finally, we have had some problems identifying just who keeps the copyright to different titles. One programmer we spoke to was a leading developer on the Commodore 64 and the Amiga (and is now working on a number of console titles) yet he holds no rights to any of the games he has written over the years. In another case, a friend of ours wrote a game for the Amiga (which was also converted to the Commdore 64 and PC) and although we wanted to include it on the site, he didn't have the copyright to it as it was sold completely to the publisher. That would have been fine, but the publisher has since ceased trading and we are having trouble tracking down the company director! As you can imagine, it gets frustrating for the developers, especially when personally they may be supportive of the idea of sites like ours.

One of the highlights for me with the website is that the Downloads section provided me with more than just a way of enhancing the site. It turned into a sort of "hero worship" for myself. A lot of old programmers and developers (and their games, of course), had a major influence on me as a gamer, having been playing games for over 20 years.

Back in my days with the Vic 20, some of the main games I used to play were text adventures - most notably the range from Scott Adams that were released for the Vic 20 on cartridge! I managed to buy most of these, and it was these games that encouraged me to buy the Graphic Adventure Creator for the Commodore 64 with a view to writing my own games. As you can imagine, I was left in awe recently when we were able to get these games for the site, and actually being able to contact and write to Scott himself!

It's been a strange experience being in touch with these people. Some I have contacted through email, others have been on the phone so I've actually had the chance to talk to the people who have had such an influence on me over the years. It's been hard resisting the urge to chant "I'm not worthy! I'm not worthy!" when talking on the phone!

To be honest, it's no small task bringing these titles to you, but we feel that the efforts are worth it. We'll carry on this search for old classics as long as there seems to be a demand for them from the website and for as long as we can continue to afford to keep the downloads section active. If you want to see us carry on with this, please support the site by visiting our sponsors, donating, or buying goods/services from some of our advertisers.

Simon Plumbe