Hi Bryan,
Actually, I've been thinking of writing a Castlevania type game myself.
I wouldn't call it Castlevania, for obvious reasons, but it has many of
the same great features of the original side-scroller. The nice thing
about Castlevania 1 was that it used public domain characters and
enemies such as Dracula, mummies, skeletons, Frankenstein's Monster,
Medusa, etc. So it is one of the classics a developer can legally bring
back under a new name and with a few miner changes here and there.
Anyway, as far as creating accessible classics a developer has to tread
carefully. I found that out the very hard way. Montezuma's \Revenge is a
25 year old game, hasn't been sold commercially since the mid 1980's,
and do you think the copyright holders cared?
I was literally a couple of weeks away from final release and got a
cease and desist letter from a lawyer working for the current
Montezuma's Revenge copyright holders. Apparently the fact the game
hasn't been commercially sold for years didn't matter. The fact that my
version would be sold to a very few blind gamers didn't matter too much
either. All that they cared about is that I had illegally written a game
with the same name as their trade mark, that all rights belonged to
them, and so on. Rather than battle it out in court I complied with the
request and ditched the product before it got ugly. I'd hate to see
another accessible game developer face a similar situation.
Anyway, like you said Final Fantacy and legend of Zelda are really out
of the practical range of any accessible game developer. Yes, I and some
others could do it, but it would be hard work for little pay. Plus it
would take ages to write something like that.
Smile.
---
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