
Open Source Game Clones - polm23
https://osgameclones.com/
======
pierreyoda
Wow, my shitty C++ Rodent's Revenge remake from highschool is there too!

I will submit a PR though as I since switched from Sourceforge to Github [1]
and now use the MIT license.

In any case, great work! Only suggestion I could make is maybe make an
"Engine" category for projects like OpenMW?

[1] [https://github.com/pierreyoda/o2r](https://github.com/pierreyoda/o2r)

~~~
xzn
Just a few months back I was porting your version of Rodent's Revenge to
Flutter for fun. Maybe I should polish it up a bit and publish it somewhere...

~~~
pierreyoda
That sounds awesome, please do!

Testing Flutter myself, it's great but I'm not convinced about Dart so far,
for instance (de)serializing JSON is a pain.

------
bdz
I wish there was a filter for games that are playable on their own, not just
the engine, don't need the original game files.

OpenTTD is successful because it's readily available, you don't need an
original copy of Transport Tycoon.

~~~
derefr
It's strange, too, how rarely the developer will just think to make an
alternative asset pack to accomplish this. It doesn't have to look great! It
can be eyebleeding programmer-art. But having it there means the game can be
_run_ , after installing it, without first having to load some assets into it.
And that's valuable for e.g. knowing whether your setup is working.

~~~
dspillett
I don't find it that strange.

Even eye bleed causing assets take some time to produce and a game may need a
fair few for the result to be practically playable. When a project is small
perhaps no one on the team (maybe a team of just one) has the time and/or they
all hate the idea of the task _and they have the original assets initially to
hand_ anyway so the time and effort is likely better spent elsewhere. OpenTTD
didn't always have its own asset sets available.

There may be a fear of greater copyright issues. The clean-room defense for
clone code isn't going to work as well for graphics and sounds, because they
have seen the originals and there are not many ways you can draw an inter-
city-125-a-like (to use a TTD example) if you desire to maintain the same
overall feel for the clone as the original.

And bad imitation art may put off more potential players than having to
extract the original assets does.

~~~
derefr
> There may be a fear of greater copyright issues.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting they actually attempt to mimic the assets of
the game you’re cloning. Rather, _symbolize_ them.

If you’ve ever seen the game _Baba is You_ , the text-tiles in that game are
perfect examples of “symbolic assets” you can create to stand in for the real
assets of a missing asset pack. Creating such a symbolic asset pack should be
the work of five minutes.

The result will not-at-all resemble the real game; but it will also
_obviously_ be “not the way the game is intended to look”, so players won’t
think that the game is just “a game with art made by programmers” like
SuperTux/TuxKart/etc. It’s clearly “the game in a state where it’s missing
something.” But it’s still _playable_ in that state!

And, intriguingly, creating a fallback asset pack like this, and showing it to
people by default (if just for a minute), will _also_ get into people’s heads
the idea that these assets are skinnable. So this will implicitly encourage
creatives to look at how asset packs for the game are made (with your symbolic
pack as an example), and maybe make one—or dozens!—of “real” packs.

------
dgellow
What’s the legal aspect of such kind of projects? I’m working on cloning a
quite popular board game that doesn’t have any software version, but didn’t
consider releasing it publicly because I assumed a huge risk of legal issues.
So currently it’s only for myself and close friends ...

~~~
zimbatm
Disclaimer: IANAL

Trademark: if the game is trademarked, you can't re-use the name. Anything
with a trademark needs to be replaced with a new name/logo that is
sufficiently different as to not induce confusion in the consumer.

Copyright: all the source code is rewritten so there is no copyright there.
The game assets like textures and levels are under copyright and needs to be
re-created from scratch as well. Or require the player to own the original
game and provide an import method. A lot of Doom engines for example would
require you to provide the WAD files.

Patents: this might be more tricky to work around. Patents protect algorithms
and methods of production which might be integral to the game. I am not aware
of games who are protected by patents.

These are the 3 legal pillars of legal protection

~~~
codetrotter
> Patents: this might be more tricky to work around. Patents protect
> algorithms and methods of production which might be integral to the game. I
> am not aware of games who are protected by patents.

Given how much money is in the games industry as a whole it is kind of weird
actually that we haven’t seen any publicly known patent trolling targeting
game development studios yet.

Perhaps they haven’t been targeted. Perhaps they’ve paid up in silence. Or
perhaps it has happened and the public knows — it’s just that I haven’t heard
of it.

~~~
Teknoman117
I think the issue here is that basically all of the wealthy game companies are
constantly copying game mechanics from each other that if any of them tried to
start litigating over similar games, the whole thing would explode in their
face.

Hence why when PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds tried to sue Epic, they did it in
South Korea.

Also, FWIW, I found this online:
[https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/273935/Texas_court_affir...](https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/273935/Texas_court_affirms_game_mechanics_not_protected_under_copyright_law.php)

(admittedly, that ruling makes sense, game mechanics would need to be
patented, not something you copyright)

~~~
Moru
Patent trolls is in general a company whose only reason to exist is to buy our
register simple, general patents and sue other companies. There is usually no
other business that can explode in their face. That is one of the most
dangerous aspect of them.

------
TehCorwiz
Minor Nitpick: Xonotic isn't a clone of Nexuiz, Nexuiz was the original name
of the project until the project originator sold the name and rights. This
caused the community to fork the project from the last stable version and
continue development with the new name, Xonotic. Today Xonotic has a small but
passionate community whereas Nexuiz languishes in obscurity.

~~~
mrguyorama
I didn't know the "real" nexuiz still survived! It was cool to me because I
didn't get to enjoy the unreal tournament days and had some interesting maps.

~~~
TehCorwiz
You can find Xonotic @ [http://www.xonotic.org/](http://www.xonotic.org/) It's
still very fun and progress on development has continued.

------
dang
2017
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15468487](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15468487)

2014
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8184463](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8184463)

2013
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5775714](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5775714)

~~~
melling
It would be great to have these listed on the right and permanently linked
(like StackOverFlow). We could crowd source submissions that are resubmits.

~~~
dang
I'd like to do something like this eventually. But how would the crowd
sourcing work? There needs to be a way to weed out the ones that aren't
actually the same story.

~~~
melling
"Trusted users"? Voting on links?

Trusted users submit links. Other trusted users can vote up/down. Push them
towards bottom, color code, etc. if ratio is not great. Have a few people
review and finalize?

------
vntx
A Warcraft 3 world editor clone would be really good for game innovation. If
someone was willing to start up a project like that, I would definitely help
fund development.

Blizzard’s world editing tools helped players innovate new genres like the
MOBA but its restrictive IP terms killed innovation dead in its tracks.

All Blizzard does now is make reskin of old game(but excellent games) and
release classic version of MMO’s.

What happened to the company?

~~~
WaxProlix
Vivendi Games bought them in the late 90s and started trading long-term
quality for results. Blizzard North, Diablo creators, were laid off due to
slow development of D3 in 2005. Insiders say that the culture shifted slowly
towards business and away from caring about games per se. Blizzard's big thing
was that they'd innovate and build without fear of costs, famously canceling
numerous games (Titan, eg) with no ROI because they felt it just wasn't right.

In 2008, Activision bought Vivendi and took Blizzard along with them. For a
while now we've just been seeing the long-term effects of those shorter-term
profitability policies. It's sad, but it kind of happened a long time ago.

~~~
crummy
For what it's worth, Blizzard still seems to be doing the build-half-a-game-
then-cancel it thing.

[https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/06/report-blizzard-
began...](https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/06/report-blizzard-began-making-
then-canceled-a-starcraft-first-person-shooter/)

~~~
vntx
A Battlefield-like Starcraft FPS pitting you as a Terran marine against a Zerg
invasion?

That would have been cool.

------
ludde
Nice to see this list. I'm the original author of both ScummVM and OpenTTD.
Feel free to ask me anything :)

~~~
mkesper
How did you manage to get free assets for OpenTTD? It's a barrier for
including many of the listed games in, say, Debian.

~~~
ludde
All the assets were recreated by various designers/people. In the early days
it depended on the original game's resources.

------
kevin42
These aren't all clones. Many of them are just playable versions of games that
have had their source code released. IMO a clone refers to a new
implementation, but a lot of these are just modified and re-released versions
of the actual game.

~~~
smcameron
Also some of them aren't clones at all as I understand the term. The "similar"
tag covers this, I guess. "Playable" also seems to have a pretty nebulous
meaning. The absence of "playable" certainly does not mean "not playable."

------
roschdal
Freeciv-web: [https://www.freecivweb.org/](https://www.freecivweb.org/)

------
Already__Taken
Shout out to CorsixTH making theme hospital wonderful to play.

~~~
srgpqt
CorsixTH is indeed a great piece of work. For the fans of the game, some of
the original Theme Hospital people released a successor called Twopoint
Hospital, available on Steam.

------
Tokkemon
OpenTTD and OpenRCT are obvious amazing ones.

~~~
kuu
How complete is the OpenRCT?

~~~
darkpuma
Very complete. I've not noticed any deficiencies at all. They added a lot of
features too: [https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2/wiki/Changes-to-
origina...](https://github.com/OpenRCT2/OpenRCT2/wiki/Changes-to-original-
game)

If you're a fan of the original games, I can't think of any reason to not play
them using OpenRCT2.

~~~
kuu
I'll check it out, thank you! :)

------
simonebrunozzi
This list should be ranked by popularity of such games. It would make it much
more useful.

------
chkuendig
Would be great to have a platform-support filter (at least for
Android/iOS/Windows/Mac/Linux)

------
haolez
I strongly recommend OpenTTD and OpenMW. They surpass the original games, in
my opinion.

------
kzrdude
Rttr is a solid settlers 2 clone,

And not to forget, endless sky is a great escape velocity alike.

------
Fnoord
Very nice curated list! Its going to be an ever ongoing battle to keep it
accurate. Something like this would be great on Wikipedia or collaboratively
editable in some other way, or allowing forks on say GitHub.

------
AdmiralAsshat
I took a look at one of the FOSS clones for Ace of Spades, and elation turned
to horror when I glanced at the "Recommended" Requirements[0]:

\- 3GHz quad-core processor

\- GPU: 1GB or more VRAM

\- GPU (NVIDIA): GeForce GTX 680

Really, guys? You took a game that had a reputation of "Runs on your grandma's
rig!" and turned it into _that_ monstrosity, while somehow still keeping the
same low-res polygon models? For what? Photorealistic water effects and lens
flare?

[0] [http://openspades.yvt.jp/](http://openspades.yvt.jp/)

~~~
striking
It's really pretty, runs really smoothly (especially on OSes not previously
supported by AoS), and those requirements really aren't that high (minimum
Intel HD 3000 with 512MB VRAM + 1GHz dual core processor, that's basically any
computer this decade).

If you still need to play using the original launcher, you can do that here
[https://www.buildandshoot.com/download/](https://www.buildandshoot.com/download/).

Additionally, if you don't love the models, feel free to switch them out.
There are plenty of pak files available for download across the web, the first
to appear in my search result list was
[https://gamebanana.com/skins/137550](https://gamebanana.com/skins/137550).

------
siffland
Some open source clones are great, "Bust A Move" on the SNES is fun, but the
open source clone "Frozen Bubble", come one who has not spent hours with that
game......

------
tazard
Hey cool! I made one of these too. If anyone is interested in minesweeper:
[https://minesweeper.zone/](https://minesweeper.zone/)

And the GitHub:

[https://github.com/reed-jones/minesweeper_js](https://github.com/reed-
jones/minesweeper_js)

Doesn't work well on Mobile unfortunately, but it's pretty good for killing
time in desktop (if I do say so myself)

------
astrobe_
I understand the meaning of the "playable" tag. I know for sure that Minetest
and Oolite are 100% playable, and yet they don't have the tag?

~~~
account42
You should send a pull request.

[https://github.com/opengaming/osgameclones](https://github.com/opengaming/osgameclones)

------
afandian
My mind was cast back to "LEMINGS", an amusingly named clone for the Acorn
Archimedes. Don't know the license status.

[https://youtu.be/c-WrhrA6ny0?t=228](https://youtu.be/c-WrhrA6ny0?t=228)

Some amusing messages if you run `strings` on the binary:

[http://acorn.revivalteam.de/?site=Downloads](http://acorn.revivalteam.de/?site=Downloads)

------
james-skemp
Is the filter doing an OR instead of an AND?

Search term: Playable Language: TypeScript

Returns more than just %Playable% TypeScript games.

------
aw3c2
Not too useful in its current form as it freely mixes third-party engines with
actual free games.

------
Abimelex
I believe 0 A.D. is missing in the list
[https://play0ad.com/](https://play0ad.com/)

EDIT: ah sorry, it's there. But really nice Age of Empires / Empire Earth mix
up / clone. :)

------
VectorLock
This was useful for scrolling through and rediscovering old classics like
Abuse and Stars! Its amazing that so many old games are under if not active
development being reimplemented.

------
arendtio
I wonder if ioquake3 qualifies as a 'clone'. I mean, isn't it based on the
original source code?

Nevertheless, it is a nice list of open source games with quite a few old
friends :-)

------
chirau
Is there anything close to Rock Band or Guitar Hero?

~~~
TheCycoONE
Frets on Fire X ([https://fofix.github.io/](https://fofix.github.io/)) is one.
And I guess the original Frets on Fire.

Edit: Clone Hero looks more recent/active. However I'm not sure it's open
source. [https://clonehero.net](https://clonehero.net)

~~~
rafaelvasco
Clone Hero appears to be the most active. Made in Unity, nice.

------
wheresvic1
Great list! I was surprised to see that wesnoth is not tagged as playable
though!

------
LyalinDotCom
The number of games on this list surprised me. Kudos to all these developers!

