I doubt there would be much of a reaction. Back in the days of the original Unreal the Internet was a lot smaller (i.e. not everyone had it). The gaming community was a bit different (in my opinion) and the companies that were creating games were a lot smaller and, as a result, they wanted those outside of their team to be a part of what they were doing (at least to some degree). This is just not the case any longer.

The market for 3D engines was fairly new and many were looking for alternatives. I can remember working with a couple of brothers from another country. They were in university at the time and developing a 3D engine on the side. They needed an artist to help them make levels and textures and I volunteered to help them. I even created a web site to show off their engine. Soon I was contacted by some guy that wanted to find the developers. It turned out this guy was from the company that developed the original Duke Nukem and they were in the market to pay for developing a 3D engine. They ended up hiring these two brothers, who now own their own small company:

http://www.scssoft.com/

This was the nature of things back in those days. Today the Internet (and the market) is FLOODED with both 3D games and engines. I can only see the type of excitement happening (as it happened back in the days of the original Unreal) with some new technology.



There have been some threads on the origins of GameStudio here on this forum. I don't remember how old they are, though. Somewhere I have a CD with all the versions of GameStudio on it (Ack, AckNex, A3, etc). Here is a link to Ack:

http://www.eledar.net/programming/ack3d/ack3d.htm

A Wiki page with some GameStudio history:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamestudio

And GameStudio's own wiki timeline:

http://www.coniserver.net/wiki/index.php/Timeline