open-source-games: A list of open source games
44 points by wink
44 points by wink
Appears to be missing one I have particular nostalgia for, SuperTux!
For context, around 2009 in Portugal the government decided that every kid in school should have a computer. This resulted in the Magalhães, a small laptop that cost something between free and 50€ if I’m not mistaken, depending on your family’s income.
The laptop was set up to dual boot between Windows XP and a Linux distribution called “Caixa Mágica”, which I think was Debian based and came with a ton of educational stuff pre-installed… as well as SuperTux!
Being 8 at the time nobody really figured out the Linux aspect of it (and internet was also quite limited), but because there was a quite fun game pre-installed on all the computers you’ve got a whole generation of kids in Portugal who played the hell out of it!
Interestingly this seems to have gotten basically no attention outside of Portugal, and even a few years ago I found myself chatting on IRC with the maintainer of SuperTux and it was wild to me that they had no idea about this! If you ask any Portuguese 20-something, there’s a very good chance they have good memories of this game :)
Many games on this list are not open source
The "living card game" Netrunner has a fully open-source free web version at jinteki.net, in addition to being developed by the community now after it was cancelled by FFG back in 2018.
I didn't find this one on any of the lists in OPs nor the outbound other lists: https://truncate.town/ https://github.com/TruncateGame/Truncate (MIT)
I love it so much
Missing The Ur-Quan Masters, aka Star Control 2. One of the all-time greats of DOS space adventure games, the original devs convinced the publisher to open source it and the community fixed it up and ported it to modern systems.
It's likely in your Linux distro's package system.
I got to the first one and there's an open-source Escape Velocity-inspired game! I might be about to lose many days to Endless Sky.