A damn shame...

Fifteen minutes ago I opened my browser and went to visit Sarien.net, a really awesome site that allowed you to play old Sierra classics in your browser. It even had a simple multiplayer feature, where players could all enter the same game and chat as they played. I hadn't known about the site for long, but I was blown away when I first tried it out. This morning, however, I discover that all the games have been taken down. I read Sarien's forums for a little while and discover Activision forced the games to be taken down. I don't want to get into my opinion on whether or not classic games should become free or public domain once they have well and truly had their day in the sun, but I think this is kind of scummy. Sarien.net was an awesome little site for fans of adventure games from fifteen or twenty years ago. A place where the fans could get together, play the games and chat with one another. I wonder how much revenue this site could really have been costing Activision. Surely something could have been worked out. Activision advertising before you could enter the games on the site, or something like that. But instead it's gone, and you can get all these games from abandonware sites in about fifteen seconds anyway. Oh well, it's the way of the modern corporate gaming industry I guess. No point fighting it.

If you want to play along at home...

I thought it might be worth saying here that, while it's not 100% legal, and you should only do it if you used to own the game, you can easily obtain some of the early Quest for Glory games online from some abandonware sites. Abandonia is my particular favourite for all the classics but there are several other good ones.

I do own the whole Quest for Glory series both on floppy disk and a cd anthology version but I just downloaded them for ease of installation.