Callahan's Crosstime Saloon playable online for free (sorta)
 

Greetings,

There's a brilliant fellow named Michael Utke who has embarked on a great (and possibly unachievable) project: he's taking the game "Callahan's Crosstime Saloon" and is re-creating it online.

Now, so far, he only has the into cartoon and the first scene -- in the bar itself -- up and running. There is no voice/music/sfx, no inventory system implemented yet, and no animation (at least, not from what I can see), but the voice and gameplay from the first scene are all there. He's hoping, with whatever help he can get, to get as much of the game online as possible. And so far, it's free for the playing.

Spider Robinson has graciously given Michael his permission to do this (which would be absolutely necessary since the rights to Spider's material expired years ago). I've also given my blessing to the project. The rights to the game -- such as they are -- are in absolute limbo; they no longer belong to Mindscape or Take 2, they reverted to Legend, but Legend was bought by Atari. Yet only certain ASSETS of Legend were bought by Atari, and CCS was not among them.

Anyway, if you'd like to check it out, please proceed here.

Enjoy!

Josh Mandel

Fantastic, just had a look. Always wanted to give this a go, now hopefully i can without worrying over getting it up and running! Good luck with this

Am thinking you are giving this a two thumbs up.

josho:

thanks for that pointer. this is /awesome/ news. [it was quite an interesting little game.]

ugh! I love this game to death. This is so cool. It deserves to be seen by everyone. Brilliant! And the designer is right here in our midst!

edit : got to play around with it a bit. It looks like it's being programmed using Javascript and CSS, code... there's some real talent behind it. What a big job! Works great. Can't wait to see it fully functional.

Wonderful project! Finally someone express some respect to Legend classics..

Very cool. :)

Out of curiosity - would there be anything stopping someone from updating the original version of the game to work well on XP? It's unclear to me who owns the rights to this game, if Atari did not purchase them. (Legend, still?)

It works on my XP, except that the sound is choppy.

Heh, interesting!

I actually have, for quite some time, toyed with the idea of creating an adventure game engine out of XML, HTML, JS, and CSS. The theory being that, if you stop to really look at the matter, the "average" 2D point-n-click adventure is really a souped-up image map in functionality. I shouldn't be surprised that someone beat me to the idea.

Although there does seem to be at least one bug in Opera 9... after I talked with the biker guy in the new convo window and it went back to the main window, the game seemed to reset itself. Maybe I need to fiddle with my JS and pop-up settings.

Peace & Luv, Liz

Rtrooney,

Oh, yes, as Art Linkletter used to say, "I heartily endorse this project." :-) I was flabbergasted when Michael contacted me about it; it was already up and running.

Fov,

Without hiring a lawyer, it's just impossible to know what the rights situation is. I've spoken to both Bob Bates and Mike Verdu about it, and what's clear is that at the time that the rights reverted to Legend from Take 2, Legend was a subsidiary of Atari, but Atari had only bought certain specific assets of the company -- and Callahan's was not part of the package. So what sort of status, then, are the rights?

Spider was kind enough to grant non-exclusive rights to distribute the game for the next two years, for nothing -- because he, as I, would rather see people play the game, even for free, than not.

So...I guess updating the game for the XP, done in an aboveboard and scrupulously legal fashion, would involve hiring a lawyer and establishing the status of the rights. Neither Bob nor Mike could definitively answer the question.

--Josh

This has always been in my top ten of most underrated games. I'm happy to see that there is a potential to hit a wider audience.

I know the troubles you had with the original Take 2 release.

This is, indeed, exciting.

Tim

You'd need a lawyer to find out for sure. Atari may own the rights and not even know about it. Stranger things have happened. It really all depends on who's contracts state what.

I would think that either Atari owns it or else the rights have reverted back to the creator. While Atari may not have bought that particular asset, they might have had a provision in the contract that covered any "extras" that were over looked. Sort of like a blanket statement like "And all other titles" etc.

I always wanted to play this game soon. I've bookmarked the link and I'll keep looking it up until the game is completely online. Then I'll play this magnificent looking game.

This is such a great, great game and I'm really glad it's gonna be able to reach a wider audience. Calling it an overlooked classic is an understatement.