Im confused as to why atari owns blood and blood 2 when WB owns the IP with Monolith, shouldn't it have been WB Games that published it and not atari? Publishing rights would have been picked up in ataris bankruptcy or reverted back to WB or Monolith

I also wonder

GT Interactive had publishing right to Blood and Blood 2
Infogrames Entertainment SA bought GT Interactive and Atari.
Infogrames opted to use the Atari name in the US because it was more popular.
Thus "Atari" has/had publishing rights to Blood, there recently was a separation between Atari and Infogrames due to a bankruptcy where Atari sold off a number of assets.

Jason (Jace) Hall (voice of Tchernobog and former CEO of Monolith) approached Atari to get rights back from Atari right before the bankruptcy so things fell through

Devolver Digital (publisher of the rebooted Shadow Warrior) said they had approached WB to get rights to redo Blood as well and said it was to expensive.

WB Games had and then canceled the Blood TM circa 2009 IIRC

Further discussion here: Who Owns the Rights to the Blood Franchise

Sigh, there goes another one..

So no one owns it? Then why can't Devolver grab a hold of it?

Judging by this tweet, somebody owns it.

Too expensive my ass. They could revive Shadow Warrior, which I think is even less popular than Blood.

Popularity has not that much to do. It's just they own the game. They haven't anything planned but they don't rush the money. So, when Devolver contacts them, they aren't really that interested.

Just imagine you have a lot of cool boxed games which you don't really use, but there they are. You own them, they are cool. You are also loaded and have another business, so you can afford to just sit and look at them.
Then I see a game you didn't even remember about and want to buy it. You don't really need the money, so what you do you say? A gazillion dollars! If I buy, l33t, you got a gazillion dollars. If not, which is the certain case, you still own the game. So you can release it, burn it, sell it, turn into a comic... Whatever, it's still yours.

In fact, less popularity may result in less restrictions. I haven't dived too much, but read this. Shadow Warrior is open source and Apogee literally says they aren't interested in commercial exploitation.

So, in my personal (and not that investigated) opinion, the problem with this game is that it's owned by an asshole company which retains the rights just for the shake of doing so. As you probably know, J.Hall wanted to remaster the game (for free and even paying from his on pocker I remember to have read), and they denied it.

So yes. Fuck them.

PD: I also take this chance to post this, in case you or anybody reading this didn't know about.
It is a total conversion, with the eDuke sourceport. So, it's not really Blood. But, as far as I played (which is the first chapter mostly), it is recreated quite nicely, not like those horrendous Doom Wads. Even if it's not the same thing, it really FEELS like Blood, and runs fairly better than the original. Not a substitute of a real re-release, but worth checking out if you want to try the original with a little of nowadays magic, like real mouselook and being able to play at your monitor's native resolution without lagging.

Fair enough.
And yes, I've heard of BloodCM and also tried it. It's so close to the real deal, and perfected beyond that, that I would almost prefer that instead of the original.
But the development for it seems... dead nowadays? I'm following the project on Mod DB and nothing's been going on over there for quite some time now. Sure, it's one helluva project but I've read some comments from the author saying they're soon about to release a new version when episode 3 is done, which is also said to be close to finish. But this was years ago. At least two.

javihyua, thanks for finding that tweet. That's the one I was thinking of when wrote that Devolver Digital had said it was to expensive. The TM is not the only IP that is tied up in Blood. Backstory, characters, artwork, code, ect would all be tied up in IP. I can't see where the TM for "Blood" is actively tied up with WB, Monolith, or Atari on the tmsearch.uspto.gov website.

The main problem is that all the pieces of the Blood pie seem to be carved up. There is some indication that Monolith may still have rights to the code that made Build, Blood. WB may have the backstory IP, when they bought up Monolith. It looks like Infogrames or Atari might still have exclusive publishing rights. It's not clear how the bankruptcy panned out, but Blood may never have been on the chopping block. Atari is selling a digital copy of Blood and Blood II on their website. It would be interesting to see what kind of deal GoG worked out to sell Blood and Blood II.

Interestingly Atari states "Cryptic Passage™ © 1997 Atari". Rights to that separate side story maybe?

Ghostbreed, I'm not sure I'd count BloodCM out completely, but that's probably wishful thinking on my part.

A number of Monolith games seem to have these legal limbo issues....."No One Lives Forever" being the prime example.

Ok, so it seems WB owns the actual IP then? Does this mean that "Atari" has caught undeserved flak for supposedly "sitting on the rights"? Are WB the real villain in this story?

If WB owns the backstory they would still have to go through Atari to publish unless they work something else out, because Monolith sold sole publishing rights to GT Interactive, which later got sold to Infograms (aka Atari.)

It's all very confusing, but it seems a fairly similar to situation that Sony has movie rights to Spiderman. Yes Disney bought up Marvel, and Spiderman is a Marvel character, but only Sony can make Spiderman movies because those rights were sold to Sony before Disney bought Marvel. If Sony and Disney were not able to come to terms, Spiderman would never be able to be in the upcoming Avengers 3 movie.

Jace Hall is, or was trying to play middle man in an effort to bring WB and Atari to terms to make a new Blood game. Unfortunately the Atari bankruptcy made a mess of the whole thing, but there have been a few tweets over the past year that indicate that it may still have some life to it.

I'm not sure that there was really much villainy on either WB or Atari's side, just no real motivation to do anything with it.