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Open Source Game Engines
A few commercial games have made their way out into the Open Source world for all to play with. For the most part these are first-person shooter engines, but not all of them; there are a couple of strategy/sim-type games in here as well.
This page doesn't include a lot of games that are just desktop toys; this is reserved for the big-time games that are known for Open Sourceness. I'm more than happy to accept suggestions, but I'm really looking for game engines more than I'm looking for the game itself.
- FreeCiv -- A strategy/sim game that is essentially a reimplementation of Microprose's Civilization games. It may be the most ambitious game designed as open source from the ground up that I've seen.
- Quake, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D -- id Software was one of the first gaming houses to release the source code to their gaming engines. The Quake engine in particular has gone on to new life in a number of other games, and the Doom code has been hacked over to retrofit features like Internet play. (In order to see how cool having source code is, check out NPRQuake, a class project done by some students at University of Wisconsin a while back. Better seen than explained.)
- Aleph One -- Long before Bungie was bought out by Microsoft and turned into Xbox-hacking stooges, they released a first-person shooter on the Macintosh called Marathon that was every bit the equal of Doom, the hot game at the time on PCs. Aleph One is the result of Bungie's pre-MS decision to GPL the engine as it was used in Marathon 2: Durandal and Marathon Infinity; it now works on Mac, Windows (the original Win32 source is lost; this is a backport) and Unix, and has even had one semiauthorized Marathon sequel (Marathon Rubicon) built with it.
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