Maupiti Island is already being sold over at DotEmu. I would like to see GOG pick it up and bundle it with its sister title and prequel Mortevielle Manor.

Thexder was my first Amiga game. Fond memories, but may not have enough substance on its own for a release here. The suggestion of bundling it with the later title or other release would be wisely followed in that case.

The Magic Candle series, as others have pointed out, is ancient but venerable. It could make a good release as a set.

Lurking Horror would be welcome, along with the rest of the Infocom line. (My favourite was Suspended, which I never beat as it was incredibly brutal.) And yes, Prisoner of Ice is a good enough game to have here too.

Mega Lo Mania was very popular on the Amiga. It is only slightly related to Populous, the gameplay is more of a high-speed RTS where you hurry along the evolution of your people ahead of your enemies so that you can overwhelm them with superior technology. Though in some cases sheer numbers can still carry the day. I could see this doing well here, along with the long requested Powermonger.

Magic Pockets was alright, some decent notions in it. It plays largely like Gods turned into a cutesy platformer, but Gods remains much superior.

Lastly, I would love to have the Sherlock Holmes games here as well, as I've not played them and would quite like to.

Thanks again for overseeing this incredible list!

I WANTED to say Infogrames but I was not 100% sure.
I remember I got it to run on different Vista machines. Now that I'm stuck with W8 I'm not sure if I could get it running, but for the most part it seemed to take fairly little offense with modern hardware, and never had the speedup/slowdown problems that Outcast does.
The biggest gripe I remember was never being able to get it running on 64bit OS's.

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.

Fascination
The Bizarre Adventures of Woodruff and the Schnibble
Bargon Attack
Legend of Djel
The Prophecy

I'd love to see this one here, but it's Windows 3.1 only game.

Hey, I remember Fascination from back in the day, cool film-noir style adventure.

Let me just dump some info I've gathered here for posterity's sake:

Nectaris
A great turn-based strategy game. The developer, Hudson-Soft was absorbed by Konami, who presently have the rights to the game.

Alien Carnage/Halloween Harry, Zombie Wars, and Flight of the Amazon Queen
John Passfield has the rights to these games, and appears to have been working with GOG on getting Flight of the Amazon Queen here for over a year now.

Alien Rampage
The artist who worked on the game, Rene Boutin, says that SoftDisk has the rights, the programmer, Chris Simms, never wrote back, and SoftDisk (now Flat Rock Software) says that they don't have the rights as far as they can tell. Rene Boutin has the contact information for Chris Simms, who probably knows what happened to the rights.

Street Rod 1 + 2
Rights are held by MK Consultancy. Apparently, the games have been made freeware.

Quarantine + Quarantine II: Road Warrior
By all accounts, these games are held by Take Two now.

And I am hot on Strife's trail. At least two leads to look into now. The assets of Velocity Inc., which held the rights to Strife, were folded into Multiport, Inc. This company then became Willows Software, which was run by Rob F. Farnum Jr, although an SEC filing says that Technology Funding, the owner of Multiport, liquidated the company in Dec 31, 1997, but this doesn't make sense as Willows continued to operate past this date and they are certainly the same company. This company was later suspended by the state of California. Either the state, which suspended Willows' rights, can say what happened to the company's holdings, or Mr. Farnum can. I'm in the process of following up these leads.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_Woods

It looks like Presto Studios bought the rights back. ("It also published some well-known titles developed by Presto Studios.") Founders were Brian Beninger and Toni Beninger.

http://www.mobygames.com/company/sanctuary-woods-inc

"In May 1996 the Victoria studio (36-person) was sold to Disney Interactive for approximately $1.9 million, and it was announced that the company would focus development on its education product line. (The Disney part was dissolved in 2003.) As a consequence Orion Burger, the company’s second adventure game, was licensed to Eidos Interactive (in June 1996)."

"In these years various steps were taken to restructure its operations. Besides changes in senior management, a substantial reduction of employees took place, from 148 in December 1995 to 32 employees in March 1997. All attempts to improve operations and cash-flows didn’t bring the desired result. On July 6, 1999 the company filed for bankruptcy."

http://www.corporationwiki.com/Unknown/Victoria-Bc/brian-j-beninger/30389189.aspx

http://benbaronsaints.com/index.php/component/k2/item/110-sanctuary-woods-revisited <- relevant contact info? (Evidence suggests they were always dog lovers) Will try sending emails.

I got one response from John Passfield a year or so ago, and I've tweeted him a few times since then, but he hasn't responded. I didn't know he had the rights to Halloween Harry, though!

For Alien Rampage, I got stuck in contacting Flat Rock, and kind of gave up from there at least temporarily. The person said he had no idea, and no contact info.

Speaking of isometric RPGs, it would be lovely to get on here. Even better if combined with the follow-up, the sci-fi release [url=http://www.mobygames.com/game/shadoworlds]Shadoworlds. These are good-looking (for the time) adventures with interesting lighting effects, good story progression, and some clever traps.

All Mindscape properties ought to be under Ubisoft's control now.

Coktel Vision was acquired by Mindscape, so it's likely those are also with Ubisoft.

Shadowlands and Shadoworlds, along with the rest of Domark's portfolio ought to be held by Eidos now.

In either case, it's not easy to get a clear answer from either company, but we can give it a shot.
http://forums.ubi.com/forum.php
http://forums.eidosgames.com/forumdisplay.php?f=72

Raven Software has the rights to their original titles (i.e. not based on licensed work), so games like Shadowcaster and Necrodome ought to be good to go.
http://www.ravensoft.com/ (Site's under maintenenace right now, but there is contact info for every employee there)

As for Albion, everyone who's worked on the game that I've spoken to says that Ubisoft has the rights to the game. Not the whole story, I'm sure, but good to know.

Also, Amiga Games Inc., which was recently acquired by Writer's Group Film Corp. has a library of over 300 Amiga games, and they've been busy announcing distribution of the games on smartphones all over the place. The question is, which Amiga games do they have, and will they bring their games to GOG?
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/h?s=writ

As for the Magic Candle games, we need to get in touch with Ali Naci Atabek of Irvine, California. He has a Facebook page (apparently outdated) and a LinkedIn page. He presently works for Eyefinity, but I think it would be inappropriate to ask them for contact info.
https://www.facebook.com/ali.n.atabek/about
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ali-naci-atabek/4/391/64b
Edit: Ah, I see tfishell has already tried contacting Mr. Atabek. But, I'm fairly certain that's a Turkish name, and that the Indian Mindcraft site has no relation to the past Mindcraft Software company.

And, about 158 titles held by Acclaim were acquired by Throwback Entertainment, and this ought to include older stuff Acclaim acquired such as Mirrorsoft's games. You can contact Throwback here:
http://throwbackentertainment.com/?page_id=63

Sensible Software's stuff like Wizball and Mega Lo Mania ought to be with Codemasters.

For Hexplore (which has major issues running under modern computers), if Atari doesn't have the rights to the game, then lead producer Pascal Stradella might know where they are:
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/pascal-stradella/1b/14/6a9
Edit: This page has an e-mail address for him, if it is the same Pascal Stradella. Both are in the Lyon area, so it's worth a shot.
http://www.restfulwhois.com/v1/coeurdegem.com

You were right, unrelated company. :P But I'm not against trying to contact Eyefinity through Facebook messaging (I probably gave up before trying them originally), at least on a semi-professional basis, and seeing if they would be willing to provide an official work email for him. (Or even just see if the secretary that the email this would pass on my own email address to him.) Worth a shot in my book. EDIT: Facebook Message sent.

I tweeted and Facebook'd Amiga Games about GOG again, just to keep the idea in their heads. :P

I tweeted, Facebook'd, and contact-form Throwback, too.

I couldn't find any contact info on the site, but I'll keep looking online. I'm wondering, though: would they have the rights to Hexen and Heretic back? Because those games were published by iD (and are on Steam), but we don't have iD here of course. But Shadowcaster was published by Origin/EA, so theoretically we could bring that.

I've sent some messages to contacts from his Facebook who look like they may have his contact info. Hopefully they'll get back in touch.

Same here, hope to hear something back, or at the very least, it will let them know that there's interest.

The site's down for maintenance, we'll need to wait until tomorrow to get in touch with anyone there. Though, the higher up someone is there, the less likely you'll hear back.

awesome thread :).appreciate the effort.Into the eagles nest, Gauntlet 1 and 2 (Hammer watch beta is the closest thing to this type of game now), and Magic Candle.All classics and awesome back in the day.Definitely would buy if they ever came to gog. thanks for update on freeware games too:)

That was smart thinking, and more likely to lead somewhere than Eyefinity.

_________________________

More Abandonia games from big publishers already here (more opinions on them needed):

MicroProse Soccer, from Sensible Soccer/MicroProse (made obsolete by Sensible 96/97?)
Mines of Titan, from Westwood/Infocom
Mixed Up Fairy Tales, from Sierra
Mixed-Up Mother Goose, from Sierra ("Mixed-Up" bundle for 5.99? original Fairy Tales + VGA FT + Mother Goose)
Moebius - The Orb of Celestial Harmony, from Origin/EA (screenshots = kinda "wut")
Montezuma's Return, from WizardWorks (somehow involves Infogrames/Atari) (1998 3D, both DOS and Windows, nGlide applicable?)
Moonstone - A Hard Days Knight, from Mindscape (6700 people rated it pretty well!)
Mortal Kombat 3, from Atari (should I assume the Mortal Kombat rights have gone elsewhere since? Acclaim, now with Throwback, .....published 1 & 2 at least)
Mortal Kombat Trilogy, from GT Interactive (Infogrames/Atari) (again, not sure what's going on with the Mortal Kombat rights)
Murders in Space, from Infogrames
Murders in Venice, also from Infogrames (Murders bundle?)
Nectaris, from Sunflowers Interactive/Ubisoft
NetStorm - Islands at War, from Activision ("Activision Publishing, Inc.") (only Windows title, so compatibility issues probably) (http://www.netstormworld.com/news.php might be able to help with tech stuff)
Neuromancer, from Interplay
Nightmare Creatures, from Activision (early 3D, compatibility issues probably; nGlide applicable?)
No Respect (plane shooting), from Ocean Software (Infogrames, Atari, etc.) (early 3D, compatibility issues probably; nGlide applicable?)
North & South, from Infogrames (good rating for 4000 people, but graphics are certainly showing age)
Ocean Ranger, from Activision (also showing its age w/ EGA graphics)

Other abandonware from companies not on GOG:
________________________

Freeware game Mine Bombers by Skitso Productions - I was thinking of trying to find the rights, but given the fact that there has to be at least 2 players, I'm not sure it's worth it.
________________________

Museum Madness, from MECC (Minnesota Educational Computing Corporation, also involved with Oregon Trail)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECC#Closure -> sold to SoftKey, then something with Mattel, Gores Group, TLC -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftKey#Acquisition

"In 2001, Gores sold The Learning Company's entertainment holdings to Ubisoft, and most of the other holdings to Irish company Riverdeep." RiverDeep's website redirects to Houghton Mifflin, http://www.hmhinnovation.com/index.php.
________________________

Mystery at the Museums, from Artech Studios - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artech_Digital_Entertainment ; Disbanded in 2011; if the game is any good (which it looks too "educational"/puzzle-y), maybe try to get in touch with co-founders Rick Banks or Paul Butler
________________________

Narco Police, from Dinamic Multimedia (although Wikipedia doesn't mention it) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinamic_Multimedia ; "In 1999, the Ruíz brothers and Carlos Abril left the company on disagreements with the main owner, and co-founded FX Interactive. After that, Dinamic Multimedia focused on an internet portal, but the Dot-com bubble burst led Dinamic Multimedia to bankruptcy in 2001."
________________________

Nippon Safes, Inc., from Dynabyte - I recall doing some research on this, but I can't remember what came out of it. :P
________________________

Nobunaga's Ambition 1 & 2, from KOEI Co., Ltd. - maybe http://www.tecmokoeiamerica.com/ can help; will try to contact them eventually
________________________

Norse by Norsewest - The Return of the Lost Vikings, made by Interplay but published by Beam Software - Beam went to Infogrames/Atari, but ended up part of Krome Studios, so perhaps we should contact them http://www.kromestudios.com/ On the other hand, KKDD was supposedly published by them, yet we have them here as developers. Hmmm...

EDIT: Oh, that's right. Blizzard took back the rights or something. -_o http://www.gog.com/forum/general/the_search_for_game_rights_a_diaryesque_thread/post37

Unfortunate news on that front. I heard back from Brian Beninger, co-founder of Sanctuary Woods, and he said this:

"Hello ... and thanks for your inquiry.
The rights to all the good old titles published by SANCTUARY WOODS are Lost In Time. (Pun intended!)

We don't have any rights to them. So can't help you but we do agree many of them should be republished.

Those were wild and wacky times. The years we spent building the company were great fun.

Best of luck to you!

... Brian Beninger"

I can continue searching eventually, but there are other titles I'd like to focus on for now.

Don't forget the original Lost Vikings too!
http://www.mobygames.com/game/lost-vikings