


Still developed and played today, front-ends for frameworks such as X11, SDL, GTK and Qt, plus fuller featured variants such as Iso-Angband, glHack and Vulture's Eye have kept the games accessible. More advanced free gaming projects emerged, such as Moria and its descendant Angband, Hack and its derivatives NetHack and Slash'EM, in addition to Xtrek successor Netrek, variants of robots, and adventure game Dunnet, which has been included with GNU Emacs since 1994 among others. However, this also led to the first deliberately free games such as GNU Backgammon, GNU Chess, GNU Go, and GNU Shogi of the GNU Project established in 1983, part of whose goal is to create a complete free software system, games included. With the rise of proprietary software in the mid to late 1980s, games became more and more proprietary. Game fan communities such as the modding community do include some aspects of free software, such as sharing mods across community sites, sometimes with free to use media made for the modification. A notable example of this is the " BSD Games", a collection of interactive fiction and other text-mode titles. These are mostly arcade conversions, parlour games, and text adventures using libraries like curses. Just as in most other forms of software, free software was an unconscious occurrence during the creation of early computer games, particularly for earlier Unix games. Given that game art is not considered software, there is debate about the philosophical or ethical obstacles in selling a game where its art is proprietary but the entire source code is free software. FLOSS game engines, like the Godot game engine, as well as libraries, like SDL, are increasingly common in game development, even proprietary ones. In recent years, this changed and availability of open-source tools like Blender, game engines and libraries drove open source and independent video gaming. In the 1900s a challenge to build high-quality content for games was the missing availability or the excessive price for tools like 3D modeller or toolsets for level design. The consequence of this is that open-source games often take longer to mature, are less common and often lack the production value of commercial titles.

Many open-source games are volunteer-run projects, and as such, developers of free games are often hobbyists and enthusiasts. In general, open-source games are developed by relatively small groups of people in their free time, with profit not being the main focus. Participants in the Free Knowledge Game Jam 2015, an open source and open data oriented game jam
