Could a time traveller sell OBLIGE-generated games in 1993?

[Memfis]

If I were to travel back in time to 1993, could I start selling OBLIGE-generated games just by packaging them with different artwork each time? Or do you think people would call me out pretty soon? I mean, nowadays if you play OBLIGE you immediately start noticing repeating elements, but back then people were less demanding when it came to level design I guess. Have there been any attempts to quickly get rich by auto-generating levels for games while doing very little actual work?

[Marcaek]

Have there been any attempts to quickly get rich by auto-generating levels for games while doing very little actual work?

 

I'm gonna get the trollpost out of the way and say Strafe

[Benjogami]

If the artwork was all good and original to each game, and if each game had unique and well-tuned settings in OBLIGE, I'd guess you could get away with about 3 such games before people got upset.

[Linguica]

49 minutes ago, Marcaek said:

I'm gonna get the trollpost out of the way and say Strafe

 

Beat me to it...

[SiFi270]

Two things I'm wondering about this scenario are, would id themselves discover these products? And if so, would they respond with a lawsuit or a job offer?

[esselfortium]

I don't know if they'd really hold up for a standalone game, but you could probably pad out a shovelware collection with a whole bunch of generated megawads and it'd be better than a lot of what actually was packaged in 90s shovelware WAD collections. I imagine that the redundancy in design would still get somewhat stale after a while, but having a near-endless supply of "decent enough" Doom levels would still be worthwhile.

[SOSU]

You shouldn't use a time machine for such dumb reasons.If i had one i would release Doom before Id did >:D (sadly no one would be able to run it on their pcs)

[Liberation]

Whatever your smoking @Memfis, could you pass it round please?

[Worm318]

If you travel back in time, why OBLIGE generated levels instead of vainilla compatible WADs from the /idgames archive or somewhere? Maybe use the best ones first to build a reputation and then start using a combination of crappy and OBLIGE levels

[Mr. Freeze]

2 hours ago, Marcaek said:

 

I'm gonna get the trollpost out of the way and say Strafe

 

lmao ouch

 

I'd steal Hell Revealed, travel back to 1994, join TNT and release it as Final Doom. 

[Test Tickle]

Why not go to the future and steal a wad from there?

[geo]

I will ignore the fact you can release Doom itself... Why would you need Oblige when you can just release thousands of .wad files as different games?

 

The GameMaker Raycaster engine is doing something similar. Sure the levels aren't procedural generated, but they're all the same game reskinned.

[JBerg]

Wait, did Strafe have auto-generated levels?

[geo]

4 minutes ago, JBerg said:

Wait, did Strafe have auto-generated levels?

It had prefabricated rooms that it would connect together.

[JBerg]

11 minutes ago, geo said:

It had prefabricated rooms that it would connect together.

 

oh man, for a bit, i had strife in mind. my bad

 

Why did they call the game Strafe anyways? I always get it and Strife confused.

[geo]

29 minutes ago, JBerg said:

 

oh man, for a bit, i had strife in mind. my bad

 

Why did they call the game Strafe anyways? I always get it and Strife confused.

Me too.

[Grain of Salt]

Oblige-generated levels would break the visplane limit, I'm pretty sure.

[Jimmy]

I don't think you'd get very rich doing this before getting caught. Oblige levels for the most part look good and play nicely, but they're still very obviously formulaic. Look at their automaps - box after box after box, with the odd squiggly bit to imply "natural" terrain. Auto-generation in video games was not so much of a thing back then but I don't think that would stop folks from suspecting you were having a computer do most of the work. Custom art design wouldn't disguise that very well either - and of course that's the "actual work" you want to avoid doing in this hypothetical.

[joepallai]

You'd need a can of Chernobly for starters....

[The Blatant Hedonist]

5 hours ago, JBerg said:

 

oh man, for a bit, i had strife in mind. my bad

 

Why did they call the game Strafe anyways? I always get it and Strife confused.

They are right on top of each other in my Steam library and it makes me want to punch a baby.

 

To answer the question: no, and the Time Police would like to have a word with you for even considering it.

[printz]

Pointless question, because time machines don't exist. And the answer is obvious anyway: of course they would have sold fine, since OBLIGE didn't exist back then.

[Guest Unregistered account]

2 hours ago, printz said:

Pointless question, because time machines don't exist.

It's a hypothetical question that sparked discussion lmao, that isn't pointless

[fraggle]

19 hours ago, Memfis said:

If I were to travel back in time to 1993, could I start selling OBLIGE-generated games just by packaging them with different artwork each time?

Given the level of quality of '90s shovelware I think it's fair to say that if OBLIGE or SLIGE had been around back then, someone would have tried.

[kb1]

9 hours ago, fraggle said:

Given the level of quality of '90s shovelware I think it's fair to say that if OBLIGE or SLIGE had been around back then, someone would have tried.

Exactly. We would all have bought them. And, the "author" could always generate a TC, and then tweak the levels somewhat, and make a pretty nice mapset with a fraction of time it would take for a from-scratch megawad. Hell, that's still true today. I wonder how many megawads on idgames used that exact approach? I bet it's not 0.

[Gez]

If you can  travel back in time to the nineties and want to make money, get all the info you can find on the evolution of the stock markets. You can try betting, too.

[Aquila Chrysaetos]

If you have a time machine, you should patent it, make all the money you could ever want.

 

On topic, it's possible people would buy it before they figured out something was strange.

[invictius]

What if you bought something like one of the zdoom community projects (vanilla-fied I guess) and uploaded it as among the first zdoom wads?  Would it create a paradox where sourceports were never developed naturally, canceling your time trip before it could happen?

[kb1]

I can think of much better things to do than Doom stuff, or even making money.