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FEATURE A HISTORY OF GAMING

A HISTORY OF Liam Dawe peeks into the belly of an unstoppable beast.

n the first ever issue of Linux Voice we briefly developer possible, to having major publishers on touched down on the colourful board. Let that just sink in for a moment, as two years Igaming. Now we’re here again to give you a better ago we didn’t have anything looking as bright as it is picture of how we went from being an operating now. That’s an insanely short amount of time for such system that was mostly ignored by every major a big turnaround.

The dark ages We start our look in the early 90s, before most popular Linux distro even existed.

ack in the 90s, people would most likely laugh at you for telling them Byou used Linux on the desktop. It was around this time that Id was creating the game , which actually helped push Windows as a gaming platform. Ironically it was Id that threw us our first bone. A man named Dave Taylor ported Doom to Linux the year after the original release, and he only did it because he loved Linux. In the README.Linux file Dave gave his reasons for the port: “I did this ‘cause Linux gives me a woody. It doesn’t generate revenue. Please don’t call or write us with bug reports. They cost us money, and I get sorta ragged on for wasting One of the first big name games to ever grace our platform, Doom has left quite a legacy. my time on ports anyway.” Doom wasn’t quite the polished 3D FPS and Doom 3, which you could download after “Improving for Linux gaming seems like that we have now, but it blew away most purchasing the Windows version to run a better plan than lobbying individual game other games that came before it, and was them natively on Linux. developers for native ports. Why the hate?” fantastic for Linux. Doom, then, has the Sadly though, no longer Luckily Timothée Besset – the chap honour of being the in our supports Linux with unofficial binaries to run responsible for a number of those history of gaming on Linux. their games like it did in the past, and unsupported Id Software Linux ports – was There were unsupported executables of a comments like this from John Carmack more positive towards Linux-native affairs: “I number of later Id games , such as 4 (formerly of Id Software) don’t help: don’t think running games on Wine is going

36 www.linuxvoice.com A HISTORY OF LINUX GAMING FEATURE

to get much easier… it’s pretty much as good Open picked up some of the slack, Freeciv even gained computer-controlled as it’s going to be. It’s such a complex piece as it always does on Linux when we’re opposition players, so you were stuck of engineering that it’ll always remain a missing something. finding people to play with. It’s a great game rather frustrating barrier. Native is where Some of our older readers may remember though, and if you haven’t checked it out yet it’s at.” Freeciv, which is a clone of the original you really should, as it’s still actively After the release of Doom we didn’t exactly turn-based strategy game, but it developed today. You can even play Freeciv have much else going for us, but luckily wasn’t until near the end of the 90s that in your browser: http://play.freeciv.org. Neither Gnome nor KDE came with a Wine decent set of games until the end of the 90s either, so things were looking a bit drab. Wine and CodeWeavers CrossOver seemed like they itself – there are many different technical aspects We had none of the really excellent open may have been the only hope for Linux . to Wine due to its replicating Windows. source games that we have now, as even Wine enables us to run Windows games on Linux Wine can be a bit hit and miss, as for some without needing any kind of Windows install, and games it may give you an almost native feel, but well known time-wasting games like that’s pretty enticing. with others it may flat-out not work. and the wonderfully crafted The problem with Wine is that it comes with a Some actually feel that Wine disincentivises Battle for Wesnoth didn’t come out until the whole host of drawbacks such as performance developers from bringing out native ports, and 2000s. It was a dark time, but it was early loss, and bugs that we may never be able to be seeing things like “We’ve been told you can try days. The day would come – we just didn;t solve due to Wine being a layer on top of the game Wine” can be very disheartening to Linux gamers. know it yet. The light at the end of the tunnel At the end of the 90’s there was a spark – Loki Software.

oki Software came up with what seemed like a great idea – it Lapproached major game developers and offered to port their games to Linux. Loki was responsible for giving Linux Civilization: Call to Power; getting a game like that at the time was almost unheard of for Linux. A Loki Software employee named Sam Lantinga (who now works for Valve) created the extremely useful library Simple Direct Media Layer (SDL), which is used by many games and companies today. Even Freeciv, mentioned earlier, has a version that uses SDL. Luckily for us a man named Ryan Gordon, who worked for Loki Software, carried on a number of games and quickly rose Xxxxx xx xxxxx xxx xx xxxxx xxxx xx xxxxx xxx to fame as a name in Linux gaming (he still xx xxxxx xxxx xx xxxxx xxx xx xxxxx works on ports today). Ryan has been responsible for some high-profile games as Civilisation: Call to Power was one of the early Linux ports courtesy of Loki Software. well as a number of indie games such as , , Aquaria, Goat Publishing was originally run by Michael Sadly LGP suffered a different kind of Simulator (that game is utterly hilarious) and Simms, and was based on the same idea as problem, as its CEO at the time stepped many more. Loki Software. LGP seemed to be a good down due to what seemed like a burnout. A little sore spot for Linux gamers is Unreal deal for Linux gamers, as not only would you After no new ports were done for some time Tournament 3, which Ryan ported to Linux, be supporting Linux, but you’ get your he handed the reins to a new CEO who but it never saw the light of day for unknown games in a shiny box. made a small push into digital stores before reasons (most likely licensing LGP based its business on the same the company finally fell silent. issues). Luckily that hasn’t stopped Ryan model, as it spoke to developers to port their If companies like LGP and Loki Software from working with the games to Linux, and offer high-priced boxed came about nowadays they would probably community with Linux-related versions of games that had already hit the have a lot more success. The porting house tasks. Then along came Linux Game bargain bin for other platforms. This was a gap has seemingly been filled by Publishing (LGP) near the end of 2001 – common complaint among gamers – Media and , which are another porting house that rose from the having to pay $40 for a game that was $5 on currently porting some pretty high-profile ashes of Loki Software. Linux Game Windows. games to Linux.

www.linuxvoice.com 37 FEATURE A HISTORY OF LINUX GAMING The indie revolution 2008 and beyond saw an ever so ’umble development.

fter the demise of Loki & LGP, Linux gaming seemed hit a bit of a sore Aspot, but from 2008 onwards everything changed, and the change was fast. In 2008 a real time strategy title named 0 A.D. popped up on the Linux radar. The developers noted on their forum that they had planned to release the game as open source and it was a matter of months away. This turned out to be true, as in 2009 it did release the , and two months later they had released the first Alpha version of the now open source RTS game. This is another big project using SDL (which was created at Loki Software, remember), so six years after Loki closed its doors its software was still in use. Thanks to the second we were graced with the award-winning puzzler Braid. This was huge news, as 0 A.D. was the first open source and completely free RTS than just game bundles – although much to Average payment $5.83 game on Linux that was being built to a our dismay not all bundles feature Linux Linux average $9.36 commercial standard, and now at Alpha 16 games now, as they have started to add Mac OS average $7.46 it looks incredible. DRM-filled bundles. Windows average $5.56 Around this time a number of slightly Linux gamers came out in force for the As you can see, Windows gamers pay the higher-profile indie games started to release Humble Bundle, and have repeatedly least, but it’s not actually that surprising Linux versions of their games. We had the smashed the average buying price when you think that many of the games highly anticipated Amnesia: The Dark Descent, compared with Windows and Mac gamers, that Humble Bundle put out have probably which was released in 2010 and promised proving that Linux gamers do in fact pay for been on Windows for some time, so their Linux gamers their first proper experience of games. If we look at the history of the value is less. a in first person. Then in May of Humble Bundles we can see just how far The obstacle that Linux gaming faced at 2010 came the Humble Bundle, which Linux gamers go for games now, thanks to this moment in time was the lack of a promised DRM-free, pay-what-you-want the Humble Bundle Visualisations website decent web store. Most big stores ignored games. The beauty of the Humble Bundle (http://cheesetalks.twolofbees.com/ Linux until came along. Desura is a was the fact that all games in it had to be humble) created by Josh Bush. small (in comparison to ) online store cross-platform. The first bundle was such a When you look into the above you can see that has its own Steam-like that keeps runaway success that it has been repeated (at the time of writing) the overall averages games up to date for you. over and over and now does much more for purchases of bundles: Desura decided not only to support Linux games on its store, but also to ported its Desura client to the Linux desktop. The client, though buggy, was functional enough, and it was even open sourced down the line to appease the Linux community in the hope of gaining more community developers. The big buzz around Desura was short-lived however, as it hasn’t pushed out an officially updated Linux client in quite a long time. This is partly due to the newer owners of Desura coming in and forcing a restrictive contributor agreement for anyone who wanted to write code for the open source client. By this time we’d proved that there was no technical reason that games couldn’t exist on Linux, and more importantly, that there may not be the biggest or most innovative game around, but it came at the start of the was plenty of money to made. The scene Linux indie craze, and had an awesomely mellow soundtrack. was set for Valve!

38 www.linuxvoice.com A HISTORY OF LINUX GAMING FEATURE The rise of Steam for Linux If people are making money out of us, we’re doing something right.

hen the news came that Valve was bringing its Steam games Wclient to Linux, it caused some controversy. Some gamers feeling that the Steam client is merely a storefront that allows the use of DRM; but considering you need to have the store installed to download and play the games, some see that as DRM. It’s a fair argument, and one best not to get involved in as it can get a little heated. Even Richard Stallman himself had a good point to make about Steam coming to Linux with this comment: “If you’re going to use these games, you’re better off using them on GNU/Linux rather than on Windows. At least you avoid the harm to your freedom that Windows would do.” I know what you’re thinking: “Ahhh, sports!”, but Football Manager deserves all the acclaim it gets. Even for users who shun services like It’s a massively popular title, and one of the first from to support Linux. Steam it’s hard to deny all the good that it does to boost Linux’s popularity. It’s not just “After this work, 2 is running at (which is quite the opposite to Steam), but it about increasing popularity, but Steam 315 FPS on Linux. That the Linux version seemed originally quite against bringing its announcing lots of Linux-related projects runs faster than the Windows version store to Linux. increases the overall awareness of Linux (270.6) seems a little counter-intuitive, given We will also get support from GOG’s too. Steam coming to Linux by itself the greater amount of time we have spent soon-to-be-released desktop client named wouldn’t have been as big a deal as it was on the Windows version. However, it does GOG Galaxy, which can be seen as being without Valve pushing its own games onto speak to the underlying efficiency of the Steam-like for its ability to auto-update your Linux as well, and even stating in blog posts kernel and OpenGL.” games for you along with adding in extras how well they ran with OpenGL on Linux. One other store that’s quite the favourite like online matchmaking. It will be useful, but When talking about their work with Left 4 among gamers is GOG.com, formerly Good GOG being as gracefully as ever has noted Dead 2 and talking with driver developers Old Games. This is thanks to its stance that the client will be 100% optional and that directly the Valve devs actually talked up against DRM, and offering good policies like its standalone downloads will exist how good OpenGL and Linux are: refunds if you cannot get a game working alongside the new client. The future The future’s bright. The future’s steamy.

n the past two years the Linux gaming as any other USB device would. This scene has exploded. We’ve gone from controller ditches the traditional controller Ipeople outright laughing at our platform sticks in favour of touchpads, and it looks to regularly seeing Linux users make set to change the way we think of statement like “I have too many games, gamepads. As amazing as Linux gaming is what do I play?!”. right now it’s pretty safe to say we would We have an insane number of games to have never gotten as far as we have without look forward to this year alone, and who Valve and Steam. To think one company has knows what 2015 and beyond will bring us? changed things so dramatically for us in We still have SteamOS, which is Valve’s such a short space of time is crazy, but Linux gaming isn’t just a sideshow: it’s where custom aimed at gaming, that’s what happens when a major player in the innovation is happening. and primarily meant to help the company the gaming space moves into our territory. push its Steam Machine consoles. Who knows – maybe even Electronic Arts than it has ever been, and we are witnessing Then we’ll get to see the famed Steam and its Origin client will announce Linux a change in the PC gaming sphere with Controller, which will work natively on Linux support next. The future for Linux is stronger front-row tickets to the show.

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