Abandonware? points of views.

A couple of days ago I stumbled up on a very interesting article written some years ago about abandonware phenomenon. I know it's a bit annoying speaking about this topic because we did so many times in the past. I tried to recover some old discussions we had when Squakenet had a forum, and instead I found this Gamespot article by Marc Saltzman:

http://www.gamespot.com/gamespot/features/pc/abandonware/p2_04.html

I am posting just the page I would like to comment that does contain some interesting points of view of the persons that most should give opinions about abandonware: the game creators. Well, I do post that link also because unfortunately the whole document has some broken link from the first page.

However, I want to resume some citations:

Richard Garriot (Ultima):

"I think that sites that support these old games are a good thing for both consumers and copyright owners."

Tim Schafer (Day of Tentacle, Full Throttle):

"There's a lot to learn from the old games because the emphasis was more on gameplay."

Al Lowe (Leisure Suit Larry):

"I would much rather see people download and play my games for free than to let them disappear into nothingness!"

Chris Taylor (Total Annihilation):

"If I owned the copyright on Total Annihilation, I would probably allow it to be shared for free by now."

Will Wright (SimCity):

"by allowing everyone to freely download or even sell collections of old games, I might lose whatever copyright claims I have on the original character."

Now, a part Will Wright, who basically claims the importance of copyright for any future business purpose, the rest of game designers are not completely against abandonware. They recognize the importance of mantaining the history for several purposes, such as Tim Schafer who is underlining the didactic importance of these games for any new game designer. They are classic and the must be completely known. I think any old game lover does agree about how interesting is the gameplay of such beautiful games compared to the recent ones (not all of them, fortunately).

In my opinion the same companies should make a common effort to preserve their assets and use the digital channel as a new selling channel. Project like GOG shows that the niche is not so tiny and there are a lot of people interested in legally buying digital, supported and working version of these good old games.