[qwertyuiop924]

Wow. Now I can play it on my Linux system. Thanks, RWS.

This, as well as being a fantastic gesture, makes it seem as though RWS understands something that many of its contemporaries don't: Games, or rather, their engines, must be open-sourced for those games to continue to be playable and relevant. You can't update your games forever, and sooner or later, they will be rendered unplayable by the inexorable march of technology. If you open source your engine, that doesn't have to happen.

Take a look at Doom. New content for Doom 1 and Doom 2 is still being released by the community, long after competitors like Duke3D have stopped. Why? Because Doom has a passionate community, and many modern, open source engines that make running the game on new systems a piece of cake.

[Maken]

Alternatively, you can keep updating your games until the end of times like Valve does.

On a serious note, the thing about Doom and other Id games is that they used to release the complete toolbox along with the game, allowing anybody to create content on-par with the base product.

[qwertyuiop924]

True, but Duke Nukem 3D did the same thing (actually, id didn't release any tooling for Doom: id's internal DoomEd was written in Objective-C for NeXT machines, so it wouldn't have been much use in any case. They didn't start releasing their internal design tools until a bit later, meaning that DN3D did it first), and DN3D's community is virtually dead, while Doom's continues to thrive.

[blakeyrat]

I was about to point out that Marathon: Infinity did it first, but it turns out DN3D beat it by about half a year. The fact that Marathon: Infinity included the game editor on the disk was a huge deal at the time though.

Obligatory name-dropping of Marathon, the greatest game to be virtually ignored by all gaming analysis/histories.

[SwellJoe]

Now I can play it on my Linux system.

It looks like it's been available for Linux for a while. Steam has it for Linux, and the compatibility info shows Ubuntu 12.04...so, I would guess the port happened many years ago.

[pkd]

That's not necessarily true. Many games show the version as 12.04 because the original Steam OS is based on it.

[throwaway7767]

Postal had a very early linux port, I remember playing in the early 2000s. I think it was one of the games ported by Loki Software before they went bankrupt (ahead of their time I guess).

I remember I had some problems with sound in it because of the in-kernel sound driver for my laptop's sound chip didn't deal well with mmap()ed access, which the game required. I used the proprietary OSS audio stack which had a driver that didn't have that problem. Of course it was only an evaluation version and would shut off the sound after some minutes of play.

Kind of glad these things are rarely an issue on the linux desktop anymore :)

[SwellJoe]

If it weren't so sad, it'd be hilarious how long it took for sound to even be close to usable on Linux. Only in the past couple of years has it become reasonable to use Linux for any kind of serious audio work (and it is still weaker than Windows and Mac on many fronts, though the latency and RT issues have been resolved for some time). I started trying to use Linux for audio in 1995, when I was still going to school for audio recording. Only now is it actually something that one might consider doing real work with.

It's always been such an afterthought, and always so flaky. For me, it was the one thing that kept a Windows partition on most of my systems through all those years.

[qwertyuiop924]

Most things work nowadays. Oxenfree doesn't, but that might just be my system config.

[qwertyuiop924]

Ah. Whoops. My mistake...

[gbersac]

It's not in their interest. If people stick to old games, they have less time to play others and buy less games.

[qwertyuiop924]

But if people stick to old games, they can make content packs for old games, and people will still buy them (and relatively cheaply, too).