I was thinking of the board game "Timeline". This one is from 2012, but if you search BGG for Timeline, you'll find lots of different versions for different countries and specializations.
The blink tag was, of course, much hated back in the day, so as an experiment, I took the binary of whatever browser I was using (Netscape, I guess), searched for "blink", and changed it to "blonk". Tada, no more blinking!
Binary editing was/is good fun. I remember replacing "__gnu_warning" with "__gnu_whining" to quiet some dumb nannying around gets(). Yeah, sure, buffer overruns, but if I'm writing some throwaway program, I can just not overrun the buffer.
I do this kind of thing with the Slack client (a silver lining of Electron apps: it’s dead simple) so that I can kill features I don’t like, such as hiding notifications or stopping the signal that I’m writing a message.
The guys who created Space Quest kickstarted another sci-fi comedy adventure game... 13 years ago. It went (and is still going) poorly, and Kotaku just posted about the ordeal today:
I’ve been waiting 13 years and just received a Steam early access code a few days ago. Someone did some regression analysis a while back based on average kickstarter demographics and estimated that 25% of the people who kickstarted the project are already dead. 13 years feels like a lifetime ago. I’m grateful they kept chipping away at the game instead of walking away, but it has been disappointing.
The money must have run out ages ago, right? So it has to have been a huge burden for the Two Guys. I don't envy them. And it seems the Early Access game they finally released is broken and not very good.
I've read an article that guesses they must have attempted changing Unity versions at least a couple of times, partly because they couldn't figure out how to solve a savegame bug (still not working right!).
25%? Wow. That seems high, but when you consider we were backing a game based on the popularity of a now almost-40-year-old franchise, it seems a bit more reasonable.
To be honest I'm not sure I want to relive that era; my memories of it are some of the fondest, but I don't think I'd like to play these games nowadays (it's been a while since I replayed them using DOSBox or ScummVM!).
Back when I was using CodeWarrior to make a game for PlayStation 2, I found a compiler bug, but fortunately, it was one where it gave an error on valid code, rather than generating bad output. I can't remember the details, but I had some sort of equation that my co-workers agreed should have compiled with no problems. I was able to rewrite it a little to get the result I wanted without triggering any compiler errors.
Mac developers who used CodeWarrior on its native platform from the PowerPC System 7 through Mac OS 9 era (so 1993-2001) generally consider it a fine compiler and the best IDE ever made.
In May 1998, before the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act went into effect, there was an amusing Tom the Dancing Bug comic regarding characters falling out of copyright. https://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/1998/05/17
In that vein, similar to the Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh horror movies that have been released in recent years, Popeye will be entering the public domain next year and people are working on a horror movie based on that.
I am curious how the long tail and changing of media consumption habits has devalued many of these characters. Mickey is Mickey and there's an entire company built on it of course, but my kids have literally no clue who Popeye is. They have never seen a Popeye cartoon and probably never will. When I was younger we didn't have nearly as much choice (2-3 channels with limited times for cartoons) - rather than Netflix or Youtube which effectively offers unlimited/fragmented options.
Additionally the main plot line of Popeye is effectively Popeye protecting Olive Oil from being assaulted by Bluto - not exactly modern cartoon material.
I think some things were a product of their time, and weren't popular/profitable enough to keep marketing or update or modernize. (whether they didn't maintain peoples' attention, or had issues like the Popeye one you mentioned) Another not-as-popular character that's entering the public domain in 2026, for example, is Betty Boop.
On the other hand, Superman and Batman enter the public domain in 2034 and 2035 respectively, so that should be interesting. Though like Mickey Mouse/Steamboat Willie, I expect that it's only the original version/costume that goes public domain.
DC Comics has done a good job of keeping Superman relevant through time as well. 40s, 50s, 80s, etc. The whole Death of Superman was a big deal back in the early 90s also even though the cartoons I don't think were as popular. You are spot on in that Betty Boop and Popeye like you said are relics from their time and absolutely don't translate - although anyone around in the early 1990s will remember a brief Betty Boop merch resurgance.
Even as someone who isn't really into horror much as a genre, it's hard not to appreciate how one of the first instincts we have as a society when freeing some IP is "We should make a creepy version of this!".
> it's hard not to appreciate how one of the first instincts we have as a society when freeing some IP is "We should make a creepy version of this!"
Almost certainly rule 34 happens first and just gets less attention in public. There were “bear” posters of Pooh all over SOMA (in SF) almost immediately after the copyright ended.
What is Soma? I see there is a video game (link)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soma_(video_game)], but have no idea what it means in this context. Are you saying there is some kind of add-on for that?
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/128664/timeline