Linux Game Publishing

» see linuxgamepublishing.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Linux Game Publishing sold games you could install on Linux without compiling anything first. Michael Simms incorporated the company in Nottingham on 5 September 2001, a month after Loki Software filed for Chapter 11 in California. Simms already ran Tux Games, a mail-order shop for Linux titles, and Loki going under was about to empty his shelves. His answer was to become the publisher himself.

He tried to buy Loki's catalog out of the bankruptcy and came away with the support rights to a single title, MindRover. Everything afterward had to be licensed one deal at a time: Majesty, Gorky 17, Knights and Merchants, Sacred, Egosoft's X2 and X3, the two Shadowgrounds games. LGP paid for the ports itself and shipped them on discs in boxes. A former Loki engineer, Mike Phillips, came over, and the first title went out on 21 December 2001.

None of it was ever going to reach me. The product was a physical disc mailed from England, and the customer was somebody willing to pay retail for a game that already ran on Windows. In Turkey the Linux question in those years was which distro you could get a CD of, and the games were whatever shipped on the same CD. Ordering a boxed Linux game by post from Nottingham did not happen in Ankara.

~ the record ~

~ the game that refused to be ported ~

Disciples II: Dark Prophecy was licensed and announced, then never released. Simms called it the game that refused to be ported, and compared it to Duke Nukem Forever in his own company's history. It ran for years and it cost the company staff. Mike Phillips resigned over it. Bandits: Phoenix Rising sat in the same drawer and never came out either.

The copy protection was its own small monument. A game asked for a license key plus your LGP account on first run, then never again. No disc in the drive, no cap on installs, and it did not phone home. You could transfer a license to someone else and they could check it was valid before buying. The deterrent against sharing was that anyone holding your account password could lock you out of your own purchase.

~ the server that fell over ~

In late September 2010 the drives in LGP's server died. The company site went down and took Tux Games and The Linux Game Tome with it, all three having lived on the same machine. Partial service came back on 23 November and full service on 8 December. Ten weeks offline, for a publisher whose storefront was its entire distribution.

~ the register and the shop ~

Companies House dissolved Linux Game Publishing Ltd. on 3 May 2011. The last accounts on file were made up to 31 December 2008. Nothing visible changed. The shop kept selling, and on 31 January 2012 Simms posted that he was stepping down as chief executive after a decade, writing that "you can't continue on a high energy rampage for 10 years without something breaking". Clive Crous took over a company that had not legally existed for nine months.

The afterlife was quiet. In October 2012 the Egosoft license for X2 and X3 expired and those games came off sale. In 2015 the site moved to Heroku and the support desk closed. The last news item anyone posted is dated 29 February 2020: the website has been archived, thank you for your support. It is still answering today, and it still describes the reseller channel in the present tense, down to the invitation for resellers to log in and arrange a dropship.

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