• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Quake and Doom prove that releasing the source code to your games is the best choice a developer could make

64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
Here's a list of all the franchises Quake (and ID, by extension) birthed from just releasing the source code of their engine (this includes games built off of Source, since Source engine is a modified version of the Quake engine)

Call of Duty
Half Life
Counter Strike
Team Fortress
Left 4 Dead
Portal
Soldier of Fortune
Titanfall
Apex Legends
American McGee's Alice
RAGE
Doom Reboot (while the franchise wasn't BIRTHED by Quake, it was based off of the Doom 3 engine.... in which, doom 3 was built off of Quake 3 arena)

This 20+ year old engine is so fucking flexible that it's responsible for 2 of the most popular shooter franchises, Valve's entire fucking lineup, and a collection of cult classics that many people adore.
Doom has also gotten GZdoom which is basically a sourceport of the game that enhances the game by a shit ton and gives you access to a 29+ year history of mods for this crazy game (including the newer stuff like Brutal Doom which could never run on DOS) as well as PrBoom which is included in Retroarch (which means that Doom can be played on anything that supports Retroarch.... so, pretty much every device you own)

Imagine if Nintendo did the same with Super Mario 64. Imagine the massive effects that could have had on the gaming industry.
 
Last edited:

Three

Gold Member
Here's a list of all the franchises Quake (and ID, by extension) birthed from just releasing the source code of their engine (this includes games built off of Source, since Source engine is a modified version of the Quake engine)

Call of Duty
Half Life
Counter Strike
Team Fortress
Left 4 Dead
Portal
Soldier of Fortune
Titanfall
Apex Legends
American McGee's Alice
RAGE
Doom Reboot (while the franchise wasn't BIRTHED by Quake, it was based off of the Doom 3 engine.... in which, doom 3 was built off of Quake 3 arena)

This 20+ year old engine is so fucking flexible that it's responsible for 2 of the most popular shooter franchises, Valve's entire fucking lineup, and a collection of cult classics that many people adore.
Doom has also gotten GZdoom which is basically a sourceport of the game that enhances the game by a shit ton and gives you access to a 29+ year history of mods for this crazy game (including the newer stuff like Brutal Doom which could never run on DOS) as well as PrBoom which is included in Retroarch (which means that Doom can be played on anything that supports Retroarch.... so, pretty much every device you own)

Imagine if Nintendo did the same with Super Mario 64. Imagine the massive effects that could have had on the gaming industry.
Including Rage is a a bit of a cheat (since it's by the same developer so would have had source code regardless of whether it was open source) but that's an impressive list of games.
 
Yeah but they also built that engine specifically with the intent of licensing it to other developers, which means they would have developed it with that in mind. It doesn't matter if it was open source either because again, they licensed it. In comparison, Mario 64's code is probably an absolute disaster.

I get what you are saying though, I think it's more that developers other than FPS should have licensed their engines so that other developers didn't have to reinvent the damn wheel every time they want to make a platformer or racing game for example.
 

ReBurn

Gold Member
I mean Super Mario 64 is cool, but they had to cover for that miserable camera control by giving it the backstory of Lakitu holding it from a fishing pole while floating on a cloud. 3D open worlds and platformers did just just fine without Mario 64 source code.
 

nocsi

Member
I mean Super Mario 64 is cool, but they had to cover for that miserable camera control by giving it the backstory of Lakitu holding it from a fishing pole while floating on a cloud. 3D open worlds and platformers did just just fine without Mario 64 source code.
Mario 64 is actually 100% reverse engineered now so there’s non-Nintendo source code of it
 

64bitmodels

Reverse groomer.
A lot of trash in that list. I don’t see how a world without CoD is somehow a worse world.
i'd say a world without titanfall and team fortress 2 is definitely a worse world- those games are absolutely amazing. Same for Half Life, Left 4 Dead, Soldier of Fortune, and ESPECIALLY portal

and by preserving the source code your game is still playable on all platforms to come after
 
Top Bottom