carnoworky

It's like being angry at a snake for being venomous: that's what they do.

An apt analogy. :P

Unfortunately, even telling the company you want to play a relatively unknown game is likely to get no answer or a "screw off" kind of answer. I don't remember the particulars, but one of the struggles the developers of the Earth and Beyond emulator faced was that EA wanted a ton of money for the source code. It was a game that was cut off about two years after launch because EA is EA, and it took the emulator developers something like 7-8 years before even putting up an alpha test of their server emulator. If I remember right, a lot of that time was spent trying to reverse engineer how the client communicates with the server.

For now, those guys have done a remarkable job of getting the game into a similar state to the game in 2004. Somehow, they keep meeting donation goals for keeping their server up and running. Sadly, the source code for their server is closed and from what I've seen there isn't a whole lot of ongoing development anymore. I don't know how long they'll be able to keep the server up. I hope that they'll release their source code if they do end up having to shut down their server, but this is yet another game in danger of being lost forever if they don't.

That was my understanding anyway. I could be completely wrong or misremembered something, or they could have even gotten rid of the code in the years since that communication was made. Hopefully you'll be able to acquire it in the future if it still exists!