Black & White is a legitimate classic, and a rollicking early example of Peter Molyneux's famed hubris. This is perhaps the most famous piece of abandonware in the scene. If this ever gets a remaster, all the grognards you know will celebrate.

You can't purchase The Battle For Middle-earth 2 anywhere today, as power-brokers have given up on the middling profit margins of the genre, but it's worth exploring if you're curious about the golden age of RTS blockbusters. (Gandalf could just melt an army of orcs.)

It didn't have the same level of strategic intrigue or mechanical depth as a StarCraft or a Total Annihilation, but it made up for those deficiencies with faithfulness to the Jacksonverse, and some of the most thematically overpowered hero units in the history of gaming. The Battle For Middle-earth 2 was probably the best of the bunch. A mega-publisher like Electronic Arts moved heaven and earth to license out a legion of top-down, click-and-drag marshaling simulators, based on whatever was currently burning up the box office. What will become of all of our ancient clamshells and jewel-cases as time marches onwards?Īges ago, in an unrecognizable era of the videogame industry, real-time strategy reigned supreme. It's a problem that will only become more pronounced in the future, as the industry grows older and the videogames exclusively released on disc become increasingly outmoded by 21st-century consumption habits. You can't buy Civilization 1 anywhere online, so if you want to experience some DOS-era nation building, downloading it from an abandonware archive is your only option, whether or not you find it ethically dubious. And yet, those landmark original instalments are off the market.

Firaxis owns those, and more Civilization games are surely coming down the turnpike. A good example is the first two games in the Civilization series. A game may not be purchasable through official channels, but a publisher could still own the rights to its intellectual property. Does that make downloading an abandonware game legal? It's a gray area.

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