Great games, nice and deep. Their Romance Of The Three Kingdoms series is excellent as well, and apparently still coming out with games.

Archipelagos was fun on the Amiga. I believe I've got Archipelagos 2000 as well on CD somewhere. An adequate remake, made during that time when everyone was trying to find a property to update into polygon 3D (see Forbidden Forest 3D, among others). I imagine it would be cheap for GOG to pick up since I doubt it sold especially well. I'd want to have to original included with it as a bonus.

I remember the Bitmap Bros games of this vintage tied in with Virgin records - Magic Pockets has a instrumental part of 'Doing the Do' by Betty Boo as its theme and Xenon 2 had 'Megablast' by Bomb the Bass (well the Amiga version did - the PC was probably still PC speaker only and just had beeps and farts, who knows, was there even a PC version of Xenon 2?)

Continuing to read your opinions, thanks. (Hopefully GOG is looking over this thread and considering your opinions, too.)

I've tweeted Epic Games about seeing more GOG re-releases in general, but have yet to hear back. You can try to contact them, but unfortunately, I wouldn't expect a response.

Yeah, there are some interesting pictures there! The person running that page is very interested in a re-release too, and gave me some contact info for Lee Jacobson, once president of DigiFX and producer of Harvester. I've sent him a Facebook message, and will send one to the company he is now working at, Apmetrix. :)

I remember playing a lot of Silent Service and Gunship/Gunship 2000 on my C64. I'm sure the graphics on all three are dated. But if I wasn't playing Bard's Tale, one of those was on the screen.
All three game are made by Microprose. I always thought, one or more of those was SSI...and it looks like Silent Service was a Sid Meier's game.

Going back through the list, to organize info and see if I can make a better effort towards making contact.

Right here: http://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_that_are_unofficially_confirmed_for_release_in_the_future/post350

I'm back to seeing if I can get in contact with people from Thalion Software; currently trying to contact Holger Flöttmann. I sent a message to Game Minds Studios, because some Ascarson people formed that, so I was wondering if they had contact info for Holger.

Could somebody help with a translation of this? Google Translate does an okay job, but screws up the layout of the page making it hard to read. http://www.gram.pl/artykul/2011/07/22/retrogram-historia-ascaron-entertainment-patrycjusze-z-nadrenii.shtml

Can you explain how Thalion and Ariolasoft were involved? If Thalion was sold to Ariolasoft (I don't know if it is saying that, of course), and if Ariola was "acquired by MicroProse Germany" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariolasoft, and MicroProse ended up in Infogrames/Atari's hands, then Atari may have Thalion's rights.

But of course I'm just theorizing.

(Found this, if I need some other names: http://thalion.exotica.org.uk/corporate/people/hos.html

EDIT: http://www.edv-rudolf.de/lethal-xcess/press/aliveint.htm:

"STS: Do you still have contacts with these famous Sceners behind Thalion Software or Eclipse? Other contacts with extra people like Mad Max?

Heinz: I called Marc some weeks ago, and I chatted with Jochen last week, but otherwise I would say no. I will try to contact Erik Simon because of some permissions for WoD, maybe he can help me with some questions concerning the rights. But if I remember right Alex asked him about that too, and the situation is not very easy, because Thalion gave away the rights the last days before the company closed it's gates forever. I would also like to contact Till Bubeck and ask him something about NEOchrome Master. And I haven't seen Michael Raasch, who is also a nice guy, for an eternity."

Yes, the article says that Thalion was sold to Ariolasoft. It is suggested that it happened in 1991. Is there anything else from this article you want to know?

Heh, if you get the chance to read it over, could you let me know if it provides any "clues" as to what happened to Ariolasoft, or what happened to Thalion after the team split up? I'm guessing there's no contact info in there.

I sent them a message on facebook. Let's wait if something happens. :-)

Nothing is there unfortunately. First of all this article is weird and unfinished. For example at one point it mentions that Ascaron Entertainment was created as Ascon and changed the name because... and then it's promised that it will be revealed later. Fine with me but it never actually happened.

Anyway, the article is about Ascon/Ascaron and it's only briefly mentioned that it's the second company of Holger Flöttmann because the first one, Thalion, was sold to Ariolasoft. Those companies are not mentioned again.

LOL, "weird and unfinished". Alright, thanks man for telling me. :) I've sent out a few emails, so I'm going to wait and see if those pan out. I may try going back and attempting to get in contact with Wayne Holder for now, and see about the rights to Dungeon Master, etc.

Hope you have better luck than I did! :)

[i]According to the German Wikipedia the following happened:
1990 trennte sich Ariola von der Softwaresparte, sodass Ariolasoft umbenannt werden musste. Als neuer Name wurde United Software gewählt. 1993 wurde United Software von MicroProse Germany übernommen. 1998 erfolgte deren Übernahme von Hasbro, 2001 von Infogrames. Diese haben sich 2003 in Atari umbenannt.[/i]


=
Ariolasoft was re-named United Software. United Software was taken over by Microprose Germany in 1993.
MicroProse Germany was taken over by Hasbro in 1998 and then by Infogrames in 2001.
And Infogrames was then re-named Atari in 2003.

So your theory about the rights maybe being in Atari's hands could be right.

Atari will soon begin selling off, without the need for court approval, its rights to the many 'de minimis' titles it holds (like Gunship, 1942 Pacific Air War, Falcon, Silent Service, Nam, Crazy Caverns, Chimera, Hardball, etc.). You can find the documents here:
http://www.bmcgroup.com/atari

Thanks bud. I tried to follow the breadcrumbs. ;)

On the other hand, http://www.edv-rudolf.de/lethal-xcess/press/aliveint.htm says this in an interview with Heinz Rudolf: "I will try to contact Erik Simon because of some permissions for WoD, maybe he can help me with some questions concerning the rights. But if I remember right Alex asked him about that too, and the situation is not very easy, because Thalion gave away the rights the last days before the company closed it's gates forever."

EDIT: Evidence suggest http://thalion.exotica.org.uk/ may still be up and running (at least in 2011), so I'm going to try to make contact with the person at the email address provided here: http://thalion.exotica.org.uk/info.html

Hopefuly GOG will look over this, and see what would be worth trying to bring here.

Yeah, it was really weird ;) That's why I wrote that the article suggested that it happened in 1991 because it was very unclear. The author wrote that in 1991 Holger Flöttmann founded his second company - Ascon. Then he explains that it was indeed the original name of Ascaron and the name was changed in 1996. He promise to explain why but as I've said - he never did. And then he mention Thalion and says that it was "only just sold". Yeah right, but which year did he mean? I assumed that 1991 because it's logical that one found a second company AFTER selling the first but in Polish (I believe in other languages too) when you use a phrase "only just" it should be referred to the last specified time, 1996 in this example. But I assumed it was the author's mistake so I opted for 1991.

Nothing really important was in this article but if it were I would suggest double checking those news because it's really unreliable.

I went to a German Fansite by a link in the German Wikipedia:
http://home.wtal.de/gmb/
and wrote the webmaster a mail. Maybe he knows something.
And now I'm off to bed.
Happy hunting!