Flashy Dragon Discusses His Flash-Based Ultima 4 Remake
Blair “Flashy Dragon” Leggett has posted a lengthy missive to his blog, explaning his perspective on the takedown of his Flash-based Ultima 4 remake.
It’s a fairly even-handed presentation of the issue(s) surrounding the project and its shuttering, and he approaches it from three different angles: his own perspective, his speculations as to what went on at EA that led to the project’s shuttering, and the comments he received from people who had played his version of the game.
Some of you may recall that the Ultima 4 Flash remake was first mentioned on this site back in April of 2010, not quite a year before it was shut down. It percolated into the news here a couple more times after that (for example: I noted that it had reached 14,000 registered players back in September of 2010). Its shutdown in early 2011 came as a shock to almost everyone, and has fueled no small amount of a) wild speculation and b) rage directed primarily at Electronic Arts.
Since that time, I’ve written at some length about the copyright status of Ultima 4, who is and isn’t allowed to distribute it, and what form(s) that distribution can and cannot take. Further commentary on the matter from me would be repetitive and superfluous. As such, I’ll just direct you all over to Flashy Dragon’s blog whereat you can read his take on things.
So when GoG made a devil’s pact with EA his site was shut down DMCA-style. EA transferred the distributor of Ultima IV from no one (EA) to GoG, then went on a witch hunt to establish dominance.
What’s amazing to me is how compliant Blair was. Typical response to authoritative figures: bow down. I don’t fault him; I’d do the same. The first time. After that it’d be death by a thousand cuts to those fools.
The alternatives are few. He could possibly have worked with EA to turn the game into a mobile title — Flash had, and maybe still does have, the ability to cross-publish to iOS. Of course, his being ex-EA and a current employee of Zynga would probably have created a world of legal hurt, in that case.
Or he could have fought the matter in court…a battle he would have assuredly lost, likely at great personal expense to himself, and probably also at the cost of his job.
Or he could have defied EA entirely and kept moving the game to new servers every few months, until they decided to skip dealing with ISPs and go after him directly, which…would probably have been the ugliest possible outcome.
That’s not to say we have to like the choice he did make, but…well, what other (legitimate) choice did he have. Not every fight to the death is steeped in honor and glory; sometimes, it’s just stupid & suicidal to fight to the bloody end.
What did you expect he could do, Sanctimonia?
Hmmm if his theory about GOG causing this is true; this might explain why EA suddenly went after Ultima IV after letting it alone for so long and never went about anything else really.
Did the cease and desist letter call him a ‘kurwa’ and demand $2000 in compensation? 😉
The only “resistance” he could offer would be to anonymously leak his game to the PirateBay. (has someone else done that for him?)
It’s built in Flash, so simply releasing the files would be of little actual use to anyone. It would need to be run off a web server, and…well, I think it had a pretty hefty database too for user profile and progress data. At least, I’d expect it had as much.
Not exactly the sort of thing you can just torrent.
I never played the flash Ultima 4 game, I speak on how good it was. To play devil’s advocate, couldn’t you strip the save data out, and just run the files out of flash itself?
One thing that sucks is that my older son who was 9 years old at the time was playing this flash version of the game.
“I think it had a pretty hefty database too for user profile and progress data. At least, I’d expect it had as much.”
Could have stored that data in a cookie smaller than most. What I’m wondering is if it streamed the output of the original executable, feeding a user’s keyboard input back into it, or if it was a “from scratch” recreation of the game that uses Flash for I/O. They have web-based emulation for consoles such as SNES which use the ROM files (stored server-side) in such a manner.
If he recreated the game and used Flash as his “engine” then its removal is far more an atrocity than if it were a technological trick involving “streaming” the original executable. The latter would certainly warrant a takedown. Obviously I don’t know much about the technical nature of the program.