With my latest game being developed on GameMaker 8, i felt like doing this article.

December 22nd marked the 10th aniversary of the last version of the GameMaker classic series of products, GameMaker 8.

GameMaker 8 was an important milestone in the life of YoYo Games' beloved game engine. Bringing a host of improvements to the Room, Image, and Object editors, GameMaker 8 paved the way for GameMaker: HTML5 and ultimately GameMaker: Studio.

Even though YoYo Games themselves introduced newer, much more polished and easier to use versions of GameMaker, GM8 is still loved by a lot of people due to it being easier (and faster) to run on low-end computers and the free nature of it's filesystem. Changes to the user interface and functions which were made obsolete made a lot of people keep using GameMaker 8, a piece of software they understood fully how it worked.

Why Open Source It?

Let's be real: GameMaker 8 doesn't compete with the world of current and modern game engines, most of the things people take for granted in engines nowadays needs to be done by hand in GM8. It's not like you can't build impressive games with it (Hotline Miami was made with GameMaker 7!) but it's that games made with GM8 need a bit of more work to stand out.

YoYo games discontinued the last version of GameMaker 8 (GameMaker 8.1) in 2015. GameMaker Sandbox, the biggest archive for GM Classic games closed it's doors in 2016. And even the classic forums became read-only in 2016, were deleted last year. It's not like they are gonna loose a sale of a more recent GameMaker version open-sourcing it, right?

Scirra is a good example of doing this right. After the release of Construct 2, they decided to open source Construct Classic. With this, a lot of classic games were saved and the community was able to bring quality-of-life improvments to it. I think that the same could be done for GameMaker 8.