If you threaten to do wrong by someone, that’s wrong regardless of whether you are actually willing to follow through and regardless of whether people accurately guess whether you’re willing to follow through.

I don’t think in-game skill is a fair way to judge that. You can absolutely have a capable developer who is passionate about the game, but who isn’t very skilled at the game itself. And unless the game has an extremely technical target audience, I can expect that most of the players who brought the challenge-winning skills to the table are not also coincidentally people who would be developing or otherwise technically supporting a continuation.

Also, if they release the source and it doesn’t get traction, no-one is harmed. Any procedural and legal clearances should’ve been done before announcing the challenge. To me, open sourcing an EOL game or other product is about giving an opportunity for others to continue or learn. It might be sad if no-one bothers, but it’s still the right thing to do regardless of when or whether someone takes on the challenge.

While I definitely appreciate seeing a game go open source instead of being lost to time, I am furious that they gated that outcome behind challenge, and especially that they were explicitly threatening to delete the game. It absolutely screams “we don’t actually care about game preservation, but we know our fans do, and we’ll exploit that to make them dance for our amusement”. That has very much put them on my “never support” list.

I wasn’t aware that there were any games that could make meaningful use of 16 cores, let alone games that might want more. Was there a major advancement in game programming when I wasn’t looking? Or is the headline as far off base as I think?

“If one root server directs traffic lookups to one intermediate server and another root server sends lookups to a different intermediate server, important parts of the Internet as we know it could collapse”

this doesn’t pass the sniff test. Records sometimes being out of date for some users is par for the course for DNS. Domain owners already need to account for that. Also, the "intermediate server"s in question would be things like the .com and .org operators’ servers. I would hope the likes of Verisign and the Public Interest Registry can handle a delay in sunsetting a DNS server to accommodate something like this.