Unfortunately I don't think I know anyone who could help me with something like that. The only guy who'd probably be enthusiastic is the kind of person who'd drop out of the project a week later, busy with something else.

Maybe CD Projekt RED would like to spare a team to make this? I can drop by their Cracow office, talk some ideas :D

The game wouldn't need to be based on any existing story (but, of course, would then require a new story that's good enough), I was thinking of any legal problems using the characters themselves, as I have no idea whatsoever how copyright and "intellectual property" law works anywhere or whether or not the characters are (or can be, for that matter) owned by anyone.

...but Sherlock Holmes used abduction, not deduction, as his logical process!

No, actually I became aware of my mistake on an episode of Q.I.!
http://qi.com/infocloud/sherlock-holmes
Bottom right of the page.

Not a bad idea! Who's going to set up the kickstarter page?

How about Rupan vs. Detective Conan?... ;)

They can use the characters that appeared in the public domain works, but not the characters from newer books. They can also use any of the stories from the public domain stories.

His sidekicks. Poirot would be the spy guy and Miss Marple would be the girl from Beyond the call of duty :D

Yeah, sure, let's turn all cerebral characters from great classical literature into comic book style action heroes. There can be Hamlet the loot-driven RPG, and a Little Prince platformer/spacesim. The Great Gatsby is perfect for a racing game, and maybe something by Virginia Woolf can be adapted into a walking simulator adventure with sniper rifles. Or how about an open-world (or better yet, "open-prairie") sandbox game based on Walt Whitman?

Nice Breja :)

Didn't see it before, but you describe it fairly well. It's got potential. And I believe Sherlock Holmes is in the commons so no copyright infringement.

I don't know how difficult a Commandos like engine is to build, or if there is such an engine available to leverage, but this seems solid at a glance.

Go for it ;)

How about a Little Nemo platformer? Wait a minute, that's already been done...

I think the Basil Rathbone interpretation of the character swung it too far onto the "cerebral" side of things. Though it's true that Holmes rarely uses violence, he's described by Doyle as an incredibly strong martial arts expert, in addition to being a trigger-happy drug addict. I haven't seen the Ritchie films, but "Indiana Jones crossed with Bruce Lee" is actually underselling him by about 50% - after all, neither of those is a genius or a crack shot.

So, Sherlock can do everything the other characters can do AND he's also got his brilliant mind. To counter that, Sherlock has an EGO meter which shows his motivation to do whatever he's doing at the moment. To refill his EGO, other characters have to witness him coming up with brilliant ideas and do all the cool shit. Whenever he does something unnoticed, EGO meter drops. When EGO meter reaches 0, Sherlock gets bored and buggers off to do cocaine.

While it's true that Holmes is able with pistols and canes, and that he has some martial arts skills (including raw physical strength), they are only marginal in his adventures. The Sherlock Holmes stories have always been about cracking a baffling case with mysterious elements (that at a glance seem supernatural) using pure logic and his knowledge of chemistry and various other fields. A steampunk action movie about SH would be like centering a Richard III adaptation solely around battle scenes. There's combat, yes, but it's only a minor part.

Frogwares' Sherlock Homes games come fairly close to the spirit of the original stories, although some elements are exaggerated. For example Holmes would never mistreat Watson so.