Gaming Confessions . . . (and seeking opinions) (Gaming)

by Kahzgul, Friday, December 11, 2015, 19:18 (3273 days ago) @ MacAddictXIV

1- No One Lives Forever (1 & 2)
2- Psychonauts

I've never even heard of No One Lives Forever; I'll have to look into it.

You might have a little difficulty finding a copy of NOLF, but it's worth acquiring. http://kotaku.com/the-sad-story-behind-a-dead-pc-game-that-cant-come-back-1688358811

That was a good read. Thanks for sharing that. Kind of unfortunate it had to come to that.

Interesting. I worked at Fox Interactive on NOLF and NOLF 2.

Here's my take: The story has its facts right, but I actually doubt Monolith (or, by extension, WB) have any actual rights to NOLF. Fox Interactive didn't work that way. If you were published by FI, FI owned the rights to everything IP related. There is at least one game that never saw the light of day (Alien: Evolution, for the original Gameboy) because Konami developed it but refused to relinquish all publishing rights to FI, so FI simply refused to publish, effectively shelving the game. Anyway, my point is that FI owned the rights to the IP. Monolith would still own the LithTech engine, so they'd have to license that for use from WB, but that would be standard and is not exclusive to NOLF in any way.

Anyway, when FI sold out to Vivendi, Vivendi would have acquired the rights to the NOLF IP. Following that, when Vivendi merged with Activision, Activision would have acquired those rights as well. There are a couple of guys still at ATVI who worked at FI back when I was there and can probably corroborate this story.

TL;DR: ATVI almost certainly owns the NOLF IP, WB owns the LithTech engine, it would be great to see the games rebooted; they're awesome.