A word on the GNOP! Flash remake and future Bungie remakes

by stevrrr, Friday, March 15, 2013, 09:30 (4054 days ago)

First, let me say thanks to Claude Errera for providing hosting for my remake at the venerable gnop.bungie.org, and thanks to everyone's kind words about the remake itself. Also thanks to everyone who participated in the "ARG", I hope you enjoyed it!

Since Bungie hasn't sent a cease & desist letter yet (to my knowledge) I'm going to assume that they either don't know about GNOP! Flash, or maybe they think it's cool, or maybe they just don't care. As such, I'm happy to announce that I've laid the groundwork for a remake of Operation: Desert Storm, written in Haxe, and you can see the progress so far here. There's not much, and a lot is broken, but it's a start!

Like GNOP! Flash, ODS-Haxe is open source (you can see the source code for GNOP! Flash here). Unlike GNOP! Flash, I'd like ODS-Haxe (or maybe OpenODS is a better name) to be a community project with multiple contributors. If you're interested in contributing, you should know that Haxe (which is open source) is almost identical to ActionScript 3.0 so if you've worked with Flash before you'll be in familiar territory.

Of course, this would lead one to wonder about other pre-Marathon Bungie remakes. Personally, I think an in-browser remake of Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete would be awesome, as it's currently impossible to play it in its desired form (as a top-down deathmatch) because it relies on AppleTalk. With some effort and a server, it would be possible to play Minotaur against others in your browser (for an example of good browser multiplayer, check out Bombermine).

The last pre-Marathon Bungie game is Pathways Into Darkness, a great and well-documented game that is all but inaccessible today. This is, in my opinion, the game that offers the greatest potential for a good remake, as the gameplay has aged quite well, again, in my opinion.

As for some of Bungie's other games, as I've mentioned before, I'd like to see them available for download, and you can vote for Oni and Myth on GOG. Although perhaps Bungie could sell them directly through their store.

TL;DR I'd like to eventually remake all of Bungie's pre-Marathon games, but I could use some help, and I'd also like to know your thoughts on this whole deal. Let me know what you think!