A few months ago, he wasn't that hard to find as he was actively posting on Twitter. But he hasn't done that for a while now.

As it is, if anyone's going to have some success at getting information about the rights, I'd have thought it'd by Tom Hall and not some random gamer such as one of us.

I don't think it'll happen.

As good as Anachronox was, IIRC it didn't do very well back when it was released. And up until now it's been a pretty obscure IP. Games are so ungodly expensive to make these days that companies will only put up that kind of risk if they're 99.99% sure they'll make a profit in return. And I just don't think there are enough Anachronox fans out there to convince them that such is the case.

That's right, up until now.
Who knows, maybe its cause has actually been helped by GOG.
Maybe it will all come down to how well it does here... Spread the word and get even your grandma to buy it. :)

and when everyone`s grandma buy it and Square Enix see the potential, they`ll hire creators of final fantasy to do the sequel

I think the hope is that, since Anachronox is not considered a valuable IP, there's a chance that Tom could get it back from Square Enix. Then he could try a Kickstarter or something to fund the sequel.

Crowd sourced funding.

It worked for Tim Schafer and Wasteland 2. Let's make it happen people.

I worked for Shadowrun too (got financed within 28 hours or something crazy like that: 500.000 bucks).

So yeah if Tim would really want to do it, he could with crowd-sourcing; i'd pay!

it`s Tom... Tim is "got-3,336,371-bucks-from-fans-recently" kind of guy

My mistake, you are of course correct. :)

I would totally be with you guys 100% on the crowdsourcing thing if not for Class of Heroes 2.

Never heard of CoH2? Well that's because they didn't make their funding goal, so it was cancelled. As were quite a few other projects I've tried to fund over the last month.

As much as I like Anachronox, the biggest deal-killer is that it's a 1st generation Quake Engine game. A hybrid Western Adventure-JRPG in 3D. To put this in perspective, Tim's Psychonauts sequel is one he absolutely does not want to crowdsource because it's far too expensive.

Making a new Anachronox game would require far more than the kind of money you can get from Kickstarter. I don't mean 500,000 minimum, like what CoH2 didn't get. I mean like $10,000,000 minimum, which is probably a lowball figure but still far more than the biggest Kickstarter ever.

Now if we're talking a 2D point & click RPG hybrid like Quest For Glory but set in the Anachronox universe, that's a bit more possible. But 3D blows the budget far beyond what you can do with crowdsourcing right now.

You are correct about the estimated development costs; however, they could try to crowd-source a pitch; a micro-demo that shows the idea of the game which they then use to "shop" for a proper developer. I think this is doable, and it /could/ work.

The problem with a pitch is that they can't show the pitch in public (this would severely reduce the effectiveness of the pitch) and if it fails, they have nothing to show for the money they spent. Of course they should release the pitch in public when there are no takers.

In my little "knowing nothing of business" thinking, if they wanted to make Anox 2, the publisher would ask:
- So how did the first game sell?
- Well very bad, it used a dated engine and was in the making for four years.
- Then thanks, but no...

If they made the sequel, no one would know about the first Anachronox, it would need a kind of recap of the story.
OR they could create an "interquel" to make the second part parallel with the first.

Why don't they make Anachronox 2 with the same tech (Quake 2 engine) as they used for the original?
I mean that saves a lot of money to keep developement costs low and as for the outdated graphics is concerned, I personally didn't care that the graphics of the original where outdated anyway, the game made up for it with great style and still looked good.

The problem is that most game publishers aren't really interested in low-budget titles... a "low risk, low reward" situation is not what they're set up to handle. Even if development costs are low, the labor involved in legal issues, promotion, and other things related to releasing a game these days simply costs much more than it used to, so there's really no way for a publisher to do it cheaply.

So then the alternative is to make it as an indie title. But Tom Hall doesn't own the rights to Anachronox, so he'd have to get them back from whoever has them, which can be tricky. If it's seen as a low-value brand he might be able to buy it back, but sometimes the rights holder simply doesn't want to sell, and there's nothing to be done.

I think the ideal situation would be if Tom Hall can get the rights to make the game as an indie title, and he could maybe even use Kickstarter funding to get support from the fans. As an indie it would be much easier to make the game for a low cost meaning it would not need as many sales as a big budget title to be profitable. But again this all hinges on who owns the rights.

By the way, I'm basing this largely on some interesting interviews I read with the head of Larian studios about how they made the shift from working with publishers to self-publishing. His comments about the relationship with publishers were very interesting, and different from the usual "publishers are bad" stance... rather it was more that publishers are set up to make big-budget titles that must sell really well, and they don't really work for smaller-budget titles with a more niche appeal.

Interview here:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/01/26/interview-dragon-commander-commander/