Posted By
Csabo
on 2003-07-27
|  Re: Fantastic Four
I have to let everyone know about what happened with, and because of this program, and because of me and James C. It's partly about the same old copyright stuff. This whole story makes me sad, and I'd rather not talk about it, but sooner or later the questions will come, and the truth will come out (as it always does). So here it is. Or at least here is my side of the story, as I'm sure James C will want to have his say.
James C discovered that the C64 version of Fantastic Four was also a Plus/4 release. There are (at least) to versions of this game. Version J is widely available on the net, do a google search and you can get it. In this version the Plus/4 part is bugged. Whether it's a corrupted disk image, or an actual bug in the game, we don't know, but now it doesn't matter anyway. The C64 scene probably never noticed it as the C64 part works, and that's all they care about. The same corrupt D64 image got copied everywhere. (On a sidenote, this happens even in the world of Plus/4. All sites have the Bigyulabolt game file, but it's the same non-working one.)
James C purchased an original copy of the game. It's a newer version, Verion K, and even the Plus/4 part in it works. He won't give it to anyone. His reason is that Scott Adams and Marvel won't give him permission.
I, Csabo, have copied the public, freely available, non-working version of the game to the rulez.org server. I marked it as "Fantastic_Four_Version_J", so we could tell it's buggy. I even let Luca know not to rename it, as I was hoping to have the good version someday - and he's big on renaming files  This, to put it very nicely, is something that James C did not approve of. Yesterday we've exchanged some emails, and in the last one I got from him things like going to jail, having one's website taken away, and rubbing one's nose into the horse's ass were mentioned.
And that's where it stops.
This stupid game does not worth it. Yes, it's a stupid, complex and extremely slow paced game, sometimes you have to wait for more than 10 seconds for the game to respond because of the excessive disk access. Is this the game all this ugliness is over? And that's not the only question that comes to mind.
Why is it such a problem to make the game public? The first two parts of the same series are already public - without any permission from anyone. We still don't have to be afraid of going to jail. Was Luca scared when he made public the rare game he discovered (Death or Glory)? Or: is being afraid of copyright really the reason James C won't give out the game? He purchased it, and that's legal, then he could have sold it to me, that would have still been legal. I would have had no problem whatsoever to create a D64 image, scan the covers and manuals and make this 20-year-old software public. I would have even sent back the original. Now that would have been in the community's interest, and that's what drives me. That's why I uploaded that non-working version I grabbed from some C64 site to rulez.org, so we would have something. At least it loads the title screen.
Well, no more. I'm resolving this situation by taking two actions. First, James C is no longer an editor on this site. For the moment he can still view it and post messages. Let me stress this out very clearly: this was his request, and not my idea of revenge. Second, I deleted the D64 file from rulez.org and everything related to this game from our site as well. We will not host this game or mention it. If you want to download something, you'll have to take your pick from the other almost 4,000 free titles. If you want to play this particular game, I recommend getting it from the net and playing it with your favourite C64 emulator, it's the same experience.
Other than that, here it is publicly. James, I apologize for putting up that file on rulez.org.
That's it. I hope there are no hurt feelings, and that includes James. If you want to discuss other stuff, you're welcome. To the rest of you: sorry if this stuff brought you down, I hate stuff like this. Let's move on to bigger and better things.
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