Even curmudgeons love free games. But my job here is to find the dark lining on each silvery cloud, so as you might imagine I've found a way to gripe about games being given away at no cost. In particular, the recent releases of Grand Theft Auto and Hidden & Dangerous have set my teeth on edge. These new giveaways include a binary executable and the game assets like levels and music, but no source. I argue that such a giveaway is not in the long term the interests of either the developer or the gaming community, while releasing the source as has happened with several other games is in their interests. The rule is: free as in beer isn't good enough to ensure the survival of a game for the future; free as in Free, however, can make a game live forever.

One of the best trends set over the past couple of years is the gradual release of the codebases to commercial games which are far past their primes. As various companies have given away the source, they've often chosen licenses which vary in restrictions. The choice of license is, mostly, a non-issue to me; this is game software after all, not a word processor, and so I hold it to a lesser standard of freedom. Some, like the GPL on Quake are about as free as you can get. (All you BSD people can stop right there; I'm not getting into it.) Regardless of whether it's Free or Mostly Free or Not-Even-Close-To-Free, many of these source projects seem to end up at Ryan "Single-handedly Keeping Linux Gaming Alive" Gordon's place, Icculus.org. There you'll find Duke Nukem 3D, Quake 2, Alien vs. Predator, Hexen/Heretic, Wolfenstein 3D, and the ever-popular Rise of the Triad. Maybe you want something that's not a first-person shooter. Ok, how about a first-person spaceship game like Descent 2 or Freespace 2? Not everything is on Icculus, however, as Bungie still hosts the continuing development of Marathon: Aleph One under a very Free license.

(Before you start, I'm sure there are other projects I've left out. Down below you'll find buttons and gizmos that allow you to leave a comment, where you can list your favorite and in the process leave me a hot, tasty flame for ignoring The Best Game Ever.)

The giveaways of GTA and Hidden & Dangerous break with this trend by not releasing the source but, at the same time, releasing all the bits of the game that accompany the executable.

See, even with the free source games, you've still got to buy the assets that allow you to play the game. For a game like Duke Nukem 3D, you have to have the levels, models, and sounds or that executable built from the freed source won't get you anything but wasted bytes on your hard drive. It's a trade-off I'm willing to accept: buy the old game data, use the newly freed client. After all, as these games are older, they can often be picked up cheaply on eBay or even the local used games shop.

But now we have the whole game being given away for free, with the developer giving up all future revenue from that game. You want to play GTA? No problem, just wait on the huge download, and it's yours. Same for Hidden & Dangerous. Free games for you...as long as you're on Windows.

Perhaps more importantly, free games as long as you have a Windows system that's compatible with the existing exectuable. You might not recall, but the original GTA was a DOS game and it didn't always work well in later versions of Windows. Similarly, the best version of Tomb Raider, another DOS game, required Glide and a 3dfx card, and if it weren't for Glidos, that best version would be useless to most of today's gamers. (Incidentally, Glidos is based on a free software project, OpenGlide.) It is possible that some games based on early revisions of DirectX will fail to work in future versions of Windows; in fact, it may already have happened. Furthermore, binary compatibility for games that worked on Windows 9x may eventually be dropped. (This is one of the ugly parts of Linux. As the underlying C library has changed, older binary applications have ceased working.) In short: there is a very real possibility that even the free version won't work eventually, even in Windows.

That new GTA binary may be more future-proof than the original was, but it isn't perfect. Only source can permit that, and if you've already given away the assets to the game, essentially forsaking all future commercial exploitation, why not give away the source? It can only benefit the developer and the gaming community, after all.

A release of the source to GTA or H&D or really any old game would likely produce several benefits:

• The game itself would see improvements that the creators never got around to adding or never even imagined.
• The game will spread to new platforms, like MacOS X or Linux and continue to stay current on Windows.
• The game will also keep up as technology changes, perhaps ending up like Tenebrae.
• There will be less tangible benefits like goodwill with the community, a larger and energized fanbase, and the possibility that budding game programmers will learn from your example.

• Ugly code is exposed for everyone to see. If it's a hack, someone somewhere is probably going to see it and laugh at it.
• Releasing the source may lead to cheating multiplayer clients. Hopefully, this problem which can be mitigated precisely because the client source is available.
• A source release could be completely ignored, especially when games lack any sort of devoted following. While that could be embarassing, it's not likely to happen to GTA, of course. I suspect it wouldn't happen with lots of games.

I'm often held up as an example of a free software zealot, and this piece surely won't help that image. But, don't ignore the message just because you don't like the messenger: Giving away the source to a game you're already giving away for free is a win-win decision. Your game will spread to new platforms, be improved by the community, and may even grow into something new and amazing that you hadn't imagined before. What have you got to lose?