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Originally Posted by Kapitan_Phillips
Would someone care to explain this to me? I'm not well versed with Falcon  |
It's a long story but here are the high points....
Falcon 4.0 (F-16 simulation branded as a Microprose product with Hasbro as the parent company) was released and suffered major bugs. The devs were able to release one major patch 1.0 and a second, smaller patch just before Christmas of 1997. Then, Hasbro laid off the entire staff just before Christmas (nice company).
Meanwhile, another company that mainly did code management (I think) began modifying what they could and releasing it for free under a tacit agreement with Hasbro. This is a little foggy but the gist of it is correct. That went on for several months. Then, mysteriously the source code for Falcon got leaked to the Internet (if we could only be so lucky with Silent Hunter).
After a few weeks, someone named "eRazor" started releasing new executables with major tweaks to the program code. He also discovered that although Falcon was released as a 16-bit product, it was in fact written to support 32-bit with many 32-bit features turned off. He started turning them back on.
At some point, through gradual and careful trust, he was contacted by some other modders and together they started releasing periodic patches to Falcon. At some point after that, Hasbro began searching for these folks and had some legal warnings flying about as to the consequences of what was going on.
In the end (and I don't know the facts here) a group of people approached Hasbro to buy Falcon and the illegal patching halted prior to negotiations for the sale. Once it was a done deal, all the work that modders both legal and illegal had done was reviewed and incorporated into a re-release of Falcon which is now known as Falcon 4.0/Allied Force and owned and maintained by Lead Pursuit.
I'm sure some of my information is not exactly correct but that's the general story.
So you can see at least some similarities here. Many of us take SH much more seriously than the average gamer and would like to see it honed to a higher degree of realism with all the bugs fixed. But the company will only invest so much to this end which is short of what we want. So it would be great if a company was able to take it over (buy it) and give it the polish it deserves.