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

by stevrrr, Friday, March 15, 2013, 13:21 (4273 days ago) @ stabbim

First, I think you did a great job with GNOP!. I'd never actually played it and I'm glad I got the chance to. I didn't realize there were so many options - I'd always understood it to be more or less a direct Pong clone but there's more to it apparently.

Thank you! The options are fun, I'm still waiting for RC to beat it on Expert, Large Computer Paddle, Small Player Paddle, Small Ball, Fast Ball, Score to Win: 99.

I don't know what Bungie's stance on their other games being remade is. They did release the source code to Marathon 2 years ago, which became Aleph One, so in general it seems like the sort of thing they might be ok with - but I don't know if they've made specific statements about the games you mentioned? My guess would be that they're probably not going to make a fuss about any games that are old enough that they can't make money from them anymore - if it's not possible for a customer to pay Bungie for Minotaur anymore, it doesn't seem like it would make any substantial difference if someone copies it.

I'm hoping that this will be their stance too -- although it would be nice to have some official word.

Seems like the later games are probably going to be more difficult to reproduce than GNOP! was? I dunno, and I'm certainly no programmer. In any case, I'd love to try some of Bungie's earlier efforts.

Yes, GNOP! was very simple, so remaking it was not difficult. Later games were more complicated, but the underlying concepts of, say, ODS are commonplace; a tilemapped top-down tank game is not hard to make nowadays. Getting it to play exactly like Seropian's effort is another story.