Following the recent discussions in the Random free game findings thread, I thought it appropriate to start a separate topic, since more of these seem to be cropping up.

Just a few days ago, I stumbled upon a 2007 post in dosgames.com forum concerning a DOS point-and-click adventure game Lone Eagle - Colombian Encounter. The user quotes a post from another unspecified forum (which appears to be no longer online) where someone called Ryan recounted how they contacted the game's author, Bill Bledsoe:

I played the demo of this game when i was 14. I sent a letter to the company asking if I could buy the full version, but he told […]
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I played the demo of this game when i was 14. I sent a letter to the company asking if I could buy the full version, but he told me it was no longer for sale because the copies they had sold all contained (or mostly contained) a faulty Diskette 2. I told him I really enjoyed the game, so he surprised me in the mail with all three disks (for free!) of Lone Eagle! He told me that if Disk 2 did not work, to let him know. It didn't work. So i sent him another letter and he mailed me a new version of Diskette 2. I installed it and IT WORKED!! I had a lot of fun playing it and eventually beat the game. Nine years later, here I am, reading this post, & I STILL have the disks he sent me through the mail. SO, I reinstalled it, & made a .zip file of it. This is probably the only copy avaliable since the whole Diskette 2 corruption made the full version of the game virtually unobtainable & impossible to find. But here it is!! I have put it up on my personal website to download 😁

Lone Eagle Colombian Encounter DOWNLOAD!! (Full Version) (linky)

you'll probably need a program that helps you play older games on fast computers
*** i downloaded DosBox & it played the game perfectly!

i hope you enjoy it!!
-ryan 😀

It turns out that this Ryan is Ryan Khatam, a US animator of some renown, but while his website is still up, he must have removed the download of the game.

While it appears that Bill Bledsoe did not actually make the game freeware, it seems worth a try to ask for that, if he is still around that is. I have the impression that Ryan was in snail mail correspondence with Bill. Perhaps someone living in the US could try to write to Bill or establish his whereabouts? I tried looking up the mail address indicated in the shareware version readme but the site officialusa.com that I found by Googling lists different people linked to that PO Box.

Ryan's current website does not indicate any way to contact him, but past Wayback Machine snapshots have a contact page that shows an email address based on the site's domain. Perhaps it would be worth trying to send an email to him too.

In other news, as noted in the Random free game findings thread, recently I successfully contacted Peter Hinz, who gave permission to liberate three games: Dshump, 3D CyberPuck and MegaDschump (an updated re-release of Dschump).

I also had correspondence with chess programmer Richard Lang, since I wanted to clarify the legal status of the DOS version of Cyrus. Copies of this game can be found on 90s shovelware CDs along with legit shareware/freeware stuff, and some chess-related websites in 2000s also offered it as a free download. However Richard told me he was not involved with the production of the DOS version so he does not know. MobyGames suggests that the DOS version was published by a company called Intelligence Chess Software, with the Chess Programming Wiki offering some info on them.

Also it is my understanding that there are efforts to locate Holger Wagner, author of shareware vertical shmup Baller! And Forget.