Thursday, 15 March 2012

Gamer pays game creator $10K as an apology for pirating his game

Min-Liang Tan, the founder of pro-gaming peripheral company Razer, has given $10,000 to games developer Brian Fargo as an apology for pirating his game Wasteland a couple of decades ago. Fargo has been using the 'Kickstarter' system to raise funds for a potential Wasteland 2 and has recently passed his first goal of raising $900,000.


In a Tweet, Tan said
"I'm sorry for playing on a pirated copy of Wasteland years ago, I hope this makes up for it."
Fargo's startled reply was:
"Wow.. I just saw that you donated 10k... You more than made up for it. I am most grateful...You are forgiven... ;) Thanks for the support."
Fargo is legendary within the video games market for founding Interplay in 1983. He directly wrote and created Wasteland (released in 1988) and later worked on games such as the original Fallout, which was directly inspired by Wasteland. He also worked on the Baldur's Gate franchise. During the numerous tumults that shook Interplay in the early 2000s, he quit to found a new development company, inXile, which is now producing Wasteland 2.
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2 comments:

  1. Wastrel15 March 2012 at 19:04:00 GMT

    Bet he's glad now that he didn't have restrictive DRM back then.

    That's probably the worst thing about DRM, from the POV of the companies - not just the short-term loss of revenue, but the fact that it makes the players seen the companies as the enemy. An enemy that has to be tolerated, to be sure, but an enemy nonetheless, rather than a respected friend who you'd give $10k to voluntarily twenty years later...

    Better to have people feel beholden to you than to have people feel harrassed by you.

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  2. Anonymous15 March 2012 at 19:14:00 GMT

    Aren't penalties also sometimes in that area (or even higher)? No matter.

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