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General discussionThe search for game rights (a diary-esque thread)(952 posts)(952 posts)
(952 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted August 11, 2013
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SCPM: Over the past few days I've sent e-mails to Steve Moretzky inquiring about Legend Entertainment titles' rights
Thanks. I think Legend would be one of the best ones to get on board that GOG doesn't have yet. They did a bunch of unique adventure games and I don't recall a single dud.
Posted August 11, 2013
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IAmSinistar: Two other games with good GOG potential are and [url=http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/siege-of-avalon]Siege of Avalon. I've played both RPGs and they are quality titles. Siege of Avalon is especially appealing to folks to who like a lot of story in their game, as the illustrated novel aspects and multiple chapters will attest.
Oh, yes! These two belong on GOG!
Do you have a lead to where the rights lie?

For Revenant I would guess the rights were at Eidos and are now at Square Enix? And Square Enix already had games here on GOG.

Siege of Avalon was published by Blackstar Interactive, a German company, that went bankrupt. Blackstar was founded by Simon Hellwig who then later founded Kalypso Media which recently brought Omerta to GOG. I might ask there. (But if they have the rights I wonder why the game isn't already on GOG...)
For another angle I found a screenshot of the game's credit page... Maybe something could come from this as well.
Post edited August 11, 2013 by Piranjade
Posted August 11, 2013
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SLP2000: How about Gorasul - Legacy of Dragon ? JoWood published it.
Well the company that hold at least most JoWood rights is Nordic Games.
Posted August 11, 2013
Touché: The Adventures of the Fifth Musketeer
3 Skulls of the Toltecs

The thing with Legend Entertainment is that their most known games were based on licenced stuff.

Xanth, Shannara, Death Gate, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, John Saul's Blackstone Chronicles, The Wheel of Time, Gateway, Gateway 2.

Not much left, and I'm afraid they didn't secure rights for digital distibution.

It's like with Elvira games, by Adventure Soft, which we have here, but Elvire titles are unfortunately not available.
Post edited August 11, 2013 by SLP2000
Posted August 11, 2013
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tfishell: My focus right now is preparing a list based on Abandonia titles, of both games that I believe they could bring because the publishers already here have the rights, and on the games I've researched up until now.
Abandonia actually lacks a lot of stuff. Home of the Underdogs is more comprehensive...
Posted August 11, 2013
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tfishell: My focus right now is preparing a list based on Abandonia titles, of both games that I believe they could bring because the publishers already here have the rights, and on the games I've researched up until now.
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RaggieRags: Abandonia actually lacks a lot of stuff. Home of the Underdogs is more comprehensive...
True. Another nice trip down memory lane is reading old PC magazines.
http://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/index.php?year=1994&pub=2&id=121
Though, these only cover the U.S. side of PC gaming.
Posted August 11, 2013
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Piranjade: Oh, yes! These two belong on GOG!
Do you have a lead to where the rights lie?

For Revenant I would guess the rights were at Eidos and are now at Square Enix? And Square Enix already had games here on GOG.
Erm, someone else can deal with Squenix, too "big corporate" for me. :)

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Piranjade: Siege of Avalon was published by Blackstar Interactive, a German company, that went bankrupt. Blackstar was founded by Simon Hellwig who then later founded Kalypso Media which recently brought Omerta to GOG. I might ask there. (But if they have the rights I wonder why the game isn't already on GOG...)
For another angle I found a screenshot of the game's credit page... Maybe something could come from this as well.
Siege of Avalon is not listed as one of Kalypso's properties. It may still be in the hands of the creators, Digital Tome (Digital Tome LP, Texas USA). They started an open source project related to the game, but it hasn't been updated since 2004. Given that delay, the rights may have changed hands again since then. All of the sites linked from this project lead to dead domains.

The programmer of the game engine has contact information up. Furthermore, he has continued to do development work on the game to keep it running on modern systems, with an update as relatively recent as late 2011. He has an email account set up for questions about the game (soa@blackflystudios.com), so I am going to contact him there and see if he has any information as to the current copyholders.

EDIT: Email sent, we'll see what comes back.
Post edited August 11, 2013 by IAmSinistar
Posted August 11, 2013
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SLP2000: Touché: The Adventures of the Fifth Musketeer
3 Skulls of the Toltecs

The thing with Legend Entertainment is that their most known games were based on licenced stuff.

Xanth, Shannara, Death Gate, Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, John Saul's Blackstone Chronicles, The Wheel of Time, Gateway, Gateway 2.

Not much left, and I'm afraid they didn't secure rights for digital distibution.

It's like with Elvira games, by Adventure Soft, which we have here, but Elvire titles are unfortunately not available.
Superhero League of Hoboken was original though, wasn't it?
Posted August 11, 2013
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SLP2000: Street Rod copyright holders
Tweet sent asking about perhaps bringing them to GOG as freeware. :)

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IAmSinistar: During my searches I came across Rage of Mages, a familiar title which seems to have been a well received game. Following up on that it turns out it is published by , whose [url=http://www.nival.com/us/games/pc-games/]back catalogue is almost completely on GOG already. It seems like it would be a fait accompli to get the remaining works

Two other games with good GOG potential are and [url=http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/siege-of-avalon]Siege of Avalon. I've played both RPGs and they are quality titles. Siege of Avalon is especially appealing to folks to who like a lot of story in their game, as the illustrated novel aspects and multiple chapters will attest.
Facebook post made on Nival's wall about bringing RoM to GOG. It's possible we don't have certain titles here, such as Revenant, because of technical issues. (though I hope GOG's team/timeslip are willing to do like DK2, Anachronix, and some other games and willing to work on new patches.)

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RaggieRags: Abandonia actually lacks a lot of stuff. Home of the Underdogs is more comprehensive...
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SCPM: True. Another nice trip down memory lane is reading old PC magazines.
http://www.cgwmuseum.org/galleries/index.php?year=1994&pub=2&id=121
Though, these only cover the U.S. side of PC gaming.
Thanks for the tip. I could create a HotU list after the Abandonia one.

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IAmSinistar: Another possible publisher to plunder is Coktel Vision. We already have the Gobliiins games from them here. They produced a number of adventure games, notably several with mature content, as well as some other game types. The following titles are, in my estimation, good potential candidates.
Old reply, but it appears Coktel Vision was part of Sierra Online, then was sold to Mindscape, or something like that. I guess DotEmu decided to purchase some publishing rights, because that's who published the Gobliiins games here on GOG.
Post edited August 11, 2013 by tfishell
Posted August 11, 2013
I received a reply from Jane Yeager Noel, who worked on the art for many of Dreamforge Intertainment's games:
"It's nice to hear that there is any interest in our old games. A lot of work, passion, and talent went into them.

I'm sorry I don't have any information for you. I don't know who would have the rights. Dreamforge was an independent publisher. Each title was developed while working for a different publisher.

Many of the Dreamforge titles were through SSI, who was bought by Mindscape, who was then bought by Broderbund, who was then bought some other company, and then sold to Ubisoft. So it's possible that many of the games would be owned by Ubisoft...though Ubisoft might not even know that! (That would include The Summoning, Veil of Darkness, War Wind, War Wind 2, Rites of War (Warhammer), and all of the D&D licensed titles.)

· The first game, DarkSpyre, was with Electronic Zoo. I remember that they were ex-Microprose employees that were just starting a company. (Microprose was known for simulations at that time.) If I remember right, they were out of business within a year or so.

· Dusk of the Gods was with Interstel. They were a decent sized company and the time, and I expect they were bought up somewhere along the line too.

· Chronomaster was with Capstone. All I remember about them was that they were in Florida.

· And Anvil of Dawn was with New World Computing. I don't know what became of them.

· Sanitarium was with ASC Games. I expect they went out of business not long after that game was released.

I've not had contact with the owners in years. I don't believe they even talk to each other anymore. After Dreamforge went under, everyone went their separate ways.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help."
Hopefully, that means titles like Veil of Darkness and The Summoning are in Ubisoft's catalog, and maybe they even know about it, but it just hasn't come here yet due to not enough votes on the wishlist or something.

And a little off-topic, but the reminder that a lot of time and effort went into making these games years ago just makes me all the more eager to see them available again. Even more, I wish that the developers could be directly rewarded from digital sales, but unfortunately that's almost never the case.
Post edited August 11, 2013 by SCPM
Posted August 11, 2013
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SCPM: Many of the Dreamforge titles were through SSI, who was bought by Mindscape, who was then bought by Broderbund, who was then bought some other company, and then sold to Ubisoft. So it's possible that many of the games would be owned by Ubisoft...though Ubisoft might not even know that! (That would include The Summoning, Veil of Darkness, War Wind, War Wind 2, Rites of War (Warhammer), and all of the D&D licensed titles.)
Sort of on this topic, I wonder what GOG would want to focus on as far as licensed works go. The D&D ones are probably the most important to me (not personally, but for the GOG fans), but of course there's also Dune, I Have No Mouth, Discworld, etc. Perhaps the D&D ones would be the most likely to come, since we already have some D&D titles here. (at least, those that say D&D on the gamecard) And of course we have Ubisoft here, so I'd think perhaps GOG could pull something off if they can bring Ubisoft and Wizards of the Coast together.
Posted August 11, 2013
Tfishell, sorry to bother you again, but did you get any info back from those friendly people from Harvester facebook page or from Eutechnyx?
Posted August 11, 2013
I passed the information of the rights of ParaWorld now being with Ubisoft (Germany) on to the GOG team by way of TurnipSlayerr.
:-)
Posted August 11, 2013
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Piranjade: Concerning Project Nomads: The developer Radon Labs was taken over by Bigpoint and then integrated into Bigpoint's Berlin office. I'm still looking for a way to contact the Berlin office directly by email.
is the guy I would like to contact if possible. <a href="http://www.gog.com/forum/general/the_search_for_game_rights_a_diaryesque_thread/post134" class="link_arrow"></a></div> Found one other related resource, the open source page for [url=http://sourceforge.net/projects/nebuladevice/]The Nebula Device, which is the engine Radon Labs wrote the game in and then later released. Last updated in 2006, the associated website is dead, and the list of developers doesn't seem to include any useful direct links back to Radon Labs.

I can try to contact Bernd Beyreuther on LinkedIn, I have a profile there. If folks have suggestions on the best way to word the request to connect, I'd really appreciate it. I suck at cold-calling.

I did locate the contact info for Bigpoint GmbH, they tried to make it inconspicuous alright. It's the tiny link labelled "Imprint" at the bottom of the page, and it leads here - http://bigpoint.net/impressum/. The general email address is info@bigpoint.net if someone wants to ping them about Project Nomads. I suspect they won't be eager to give out their employee info, but one never knows.

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Just heard back from Steven Davis regarding Siege of Avalon, here's what he had to say:

Thanks for your interest in SoA. As far as I know the current copyright holder is Van Collins, one of the original owners of Digital Tome. The game itself was released to the open source community some time ago with the stated goal of porting it to Linux. However, little work has been done toward this goal.

I'll see what I can find out about this, perhaps from the porting effort, as well as try to trace Van Collins.

EDIT: Van Collins is on LinkedIn as well. Sorry if the URL doesn't work for you, it's a search result string since he is outside my network. But if you search for Van Collins, you'll find him listed as "Owner, V3 Entertainment", with a reference back to Digital Tome.

The aforementioned open source project seems like a non-starter, and was probably only intended to port the engine itself anyway, rather than make the whole game publicly available for free.

Post edited August 11, 2013 by IAmSinistar
Posted August 11, 2013
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IAmSinistar: Concerning Project Nomads:
I can try to contact Bernd Beyreuther on LinkedIn, I have a profile there. If folks have suggestions on the best way to word the request to connect, I'd really appreciate it. I suck at cold-calling.

I did locate the contact info for Bigpoint GmbH, they tried to make it inconspicuous alright. It's the tiny link labelled "Imprint" at the bottom of the page, and it leads here - http://bigpoint.net/impressum/. The general email address is info@bigpoint.net if someone wants to ping them about Project Nomads. I suspect they won't be eager to give out their employee info, but one never knows.
I saw that too but I fear that an email sent to info@bigpoint.net might not reach Bernd Beyreuther. I'll actually try to call him tomorrow, and if that doesn't work you could try the LinkedIn angle? I cannot really help you with wording though as English is not my native language.

Congrats on your progress with Siege of Avalon!
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IAmSinistar: I'll see what I can find out about this, perhaps from the porting effort, as well as try to trace Van Collins.

EDIT: Van Collins is on LinkedIn as well. Sorry if the URL doesn't work for you, it's a search result string since he is outside my network. But if you search for Van Collins, you'll find him listed as "Owner, V3 Entertainment", with a reference back to Digital Tome.
I found an email address for that:
van@v3-ent.com
Maybe that works better for you than a LinkedIn message?
(Hopefully that company still exists...)
Post edited August 11, 2013 by Piranjade
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionThe search for game rights (a diary-esque thread)(952 posts)(952 posts)
(952 posts)