Ports of Sonic CD and Marathon 2 Make Their Way to iOS

This is fantastic. It seems Sega knows what consumers want. Software for all platforms.

No one should purchase that Marathon port. One of the Aelph One developers has said that the art he made for Bungie that he was later given license to distribute for free is being offered as paid IAP content by the app's developer without ever consulting the original artist.

"So I spent the last few months, building the ultimate versions of Marathon, Marathon Durandal and Marathon Infinity for the Mac and PC. We did a big release on Dec 1st.

I wanted Daniel to use all the stuff we put into the release, but he never got back to me. Looks like he just ripped out the XLBA stuff anyway and put it in. I hope he pulled from our release, as we were able to get some stuff that was better quality than what I put in the XBLA version."

"I made Marathon Durandal for XBLA for MS Game Studios and Bungie. Freeverse created all the HD art assets and such. The deal means Bungie owns these materials.

I then sat down with Bungie not too long ago, about how to make the best 1.0 version of Marathon for the modern Mac and PC. Part of this deal was to get the rights to release the XBLA content for free.

Then this guy Daniel comes along and ports the Open Source Aleph One game engine (that runs marathon) to the iPad. Then to offset his dev costs (a legit reason) he included IAP, which was selling some cheats and a fan made HD texture pack (I assume he is splitting the profits, I don't know).

That I was fine with. A guy named Tim made the HD art, so it makes sense that he can sell it.

But with Marathon 2, he's selling basically my artwork (that belongs to Bungie). I assume Bungie knows and approved this, it's just kind of brings me down, when I released all of this content for free on the web (in a much better version of Marathon with extra bugs fixed).

I take my Marathon very serious. When someone messes around with it I do take it very personally."

Still waiting Sonic & Knucles... They even made a Sonic 4 but haven't bring that to iOS. :(

What?

iOS (http://appshopper.com/games/sonic-the-hedgehog-4-episode-i) was one of the first platforms for Sonic 4 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_the_Hedgehog_4) when it launched last year.

Way Past Cool!

Yes Sonic CD! I love this game, every since playing the Sega CD version almost 20 years ago. For $1.99 it was a no-brainer. It plays pretty well on the iPhone too, I'd like iControl Pad support but that's a dream... either way I look forward to the Playstation 3 port next week. :)

Marathon is very cool as well, I remember my old Macintosh 7100 struggling to run that game decently. haha

This is awesome, really brings back memories.

Just bought it! Can't wait to give it a test drive!

I want super Mario brothers!

I seem to remember Nintendo shareholders screaming for back catalog titles on ios a while back…

Not likely while Nintendo are still making any sort of hardware, unfortunately.

Marathon 2 is, without a doubt, the BEST game ever in its category, regardless of platform...this is truly EXCELLENT news to those who lived the good ol' days when Bungie developed only for the Mac.

Yeah, System Shock is better... :p

No one should purchase that Marathon port...

But with Marathon 2, he's selling basically my artwork (that belongs to Bungie). I assume Bungie knows and approved this, ...

So, long story short, this guy got paid by Bungie for doing artwork, and Bungie was generous enough to allow him to release it for free. He repays them by trying to sabotage their business by telling people to not buy their stuff. Great. This is why I do not release free software. Not that everybody's a self-entitled ****** like him, but enough are that it's not worth dealing with the hassle.

This is why I do not release free software.

You were doing so well until that point.

What I do know is this sort of outrage is all too typical of the free software community.

There you go again. It has nothing to do with free software vs closed software, it's just a tiny little human drama, plain and simple. There's a disagreement, it gets a bit messy, it'll be resolved (one way or another).

We can't make any judgements without knowing the full story. If there has been a 'misunderstanding' along the way, then hopefully it'll be settled to everyone's satisfaction and everyone can be happy. This happens all of the time in the proprietary world, you just don't see it because everything is less open.

Apart from anything else (and if I understand his statement correctly), you have your argument ass-backwards, because these assets were proprietary when he created them. If it had been part of a free project initially, you'd be able to see the license (GPL, BSD, CC, whatever) and there would be no ambiguity. As it happens, because there are probably two private contracts/licenses involved (artist > bungie, bungie > iOS dev), it's all a bit murky and leads to people like you jumping to silly (and sweeping) conclusions about free software.