
A Dead PC Game That Can't Come Back - v4n4d1s
http://kotaku.com/the-sad-story-behind-a-dead-pc-game-that-cant-come-back-1688358811
======
quanticle
This story, in a nutshell, shows why it's ludicrous to have a 70-year
copyright term. There are large swaths of our culture that are going to be
locked away for decades precisely because _everybody_ , corporations and
individuals alike, are bad at keeping records for longer than a decade or so.

If we'd had a more reasonable copyright system, No One Lives Forever would
have been public domain by now, and anyone would have been free to update it,
re-release it, use its assets for other projects, etc. Instead, it's
(figuratively) locked away in a warehouse somewhere, like the Holy Grail at
the end of Indiana Jones.

~~~
talmand
That was the Ark of the Covenant.

The Holy Grail was lost because somebody crossed the seal which enhanced their
ability to drop important artifacts.

~~~
quanticle
You're right, of course. My only defense is that it's been a long time since I
last watched the movies.

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anigbrowl
Think corporate guys. Set up and LLC, use it to launch the game, if it gets
sued you tow it out to sea and sink it. The multiple publishers involved can't
decide who owns it and won't release the rights? Just means that the cost of
transferring title and wrapping up all the legal/contractual issues is more
than they want to throw away on a scrap of publicity. Give them a target with
a dollar sign hanging from it and they'll either work out who owns it or
present a united front to demand a share of any revenue.

Corporations feed on money. If you want something from them, you use it as a
lure, like bringing a deer to a salt lick.

~~~
cookiecaper
This is a cute fantasy but it's wrong on multiple fronts. First, incorporation
does not protect directors from tort liability. If you can't invoke
_respondeat superior_ , it's somewhat likely that you'll be personally liable
for any tort claims. Your LLC won't shield you, and you'll be liable for
infringement damages.

Second, corporations have teams of lawyers whose whole job is to find marginal
infringements of their IP and pursue said infringers. It doesn't matter that
it's going to cost the company more money than it's worth in _your particular
instance_. What matters is that the company establishes a reputation for
mercilessly pursuing infringers, because such a reputation deters further
infringement, and because it precludes the possibility of someone claiming
that the work was abandoned or no longer of interest (which doesn't negate
copyright infringement claims, but could limit damages; it potentially could
negate trademark claims).

Do _not_ fool yourself into believing that your small-time operation won't
raise the attention of big corporate lawyers. For the extra cherry on top,
note that if you _do_ raise the notice of big corporate lawyers, you'll be
forced to comply no matter how wrong they are, since they'll pursue every
strategy to make the legal fight as long and expensive as humanly possible and
you'll eventually have to settle unless you already have $5 million+ sitting
around with your lawyers' name on it.

Uzi Nissan, rightful owner of nissan.com, spent 9 years and approximately 3
million dollars defending against Nissan's attempt to wrest his domain from
him, and they're still trying to get at him by filing frivolous trademarks.
[0]

That is the MO of big corporate law. They absolutely can and will use their
larger position to bully you, and you don't really have the option to take the
dispute to court if you aren't pulling in tens of millions in annual revenue.

The Walt Disney Company famously sent a C&D to a day care in Florida [1] for
having unlicensed representations of their characters painted on the walls.

IANAL and everything I said is probably wrong.

[0] [http://www.digest.com/Big_Story.php](http://www.digest.com/Big_Story.php)

[1]
[http://www.snopes.com/disney/wdco/daycare.asp](http://www.snopes.com/disney/wdco/daycare.asp)

~~~
darkmighty
In the case of mr Nissan, if he wins doesn't he get his legal costs back? (I
know it's a huge hassle anyway, but better than nothing)

~~~
cookiecaper
He addressed this at the end of the posted timeline. He was awarded $58k in
legal fees, which he calls "less than 2%" of the total cost of the defense
(this is where the $3 million cost estimate is calculated from, which is
aligned with the expense of similar cases that I'm familiar with).

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newobj
I coded the AI for NOLF. It's nice to see people still talking about the game
~15 years later! :) It was a blast to make.

~~~
martincmartin
Thanks for helping to create it. It was a blast to play. I loved the Old Man
Murray review:

[http://www.oldmanmurray.com/longreviews/751.html](http://www.oldmanmurray.com/longreviews/751.html)

~~~
newobj
That review (and Erik's review of the game on Gamespot) were my favorite
reviews, mainly because Monolith seemed to be their go-to whipping boy of game
companies :) So, it felt redeeming :)

~~~
busterarm
Did you work on AvP2 at all?

Still one of the best, most underrated multiplayer shooters in pretty much
ever.

~~~
newobj
Only in a minimal consultative capacity. As I recall, the code was a fork of
NOLF, but I don't remember at what point in development. Obviously, things had
to change up big time, especially vis-a-vis wall-walking etc.

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DIVx0
I had completely forgotten about this game and now that I read this I really
would love to play it again.

It is baffling how something like this could happen, media companies sit on so
many properties like this that they will never exploit. I know that in some
cases not using the property is some sort of strategy but in cases like this
they are leaving money on the table. Might be peanuts to them but it seems
like an opportunity for some in-house streamlining to fully exercise dead
properties.

~~~
ghaff
>Might be peanuts to them but it seems like an opportunity for some in-house
streamlining to fully exercise dead properties.

That's the thing. It is peanuts. And it's peanuts that would probably be
distracting from their primary focus.

Someone at $LARGE_COMPUTER_COMPANY once basically told me that, for them, if
something wasn't going to be a billion dollar business, it wasn't interesting.
Sure, something smaller might nominally have a positive ROI, but if you factor
in the distraction/opportunity cost/etc., they just couldn't afford to deal
with yet another $50 million revenue opportunity.

~~~
jhall1468
> ...they just couldn't afford to deal with yet another $50 million revenue
> opportunity.

I wonder if Facebook was just a "$50 million revenue opportunity" and that's
why Google didn't enter the space until it was too late. Maybe if Square and
Westwood would have looked at a few more $50 million revenue opportunities
they'd still exist.

~~~
ghaff
Actually, Google launched Orkut at about the same time as Facebook launched.

Your basic point is fair enough but companies do need to focus and the larger
they are the less they can afford to be distracted by small projects/products
that have little hope of breaking out into something substantial. In this
respect, they're something like VCs.

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elthran
This stuff always depresses me when I hear about it - I definitely feel we
need stronger laws to aid people in reviving abandonware. I'd love to know
more about Warner's reasoning for not going forward with a deal - it's
essentially free money

~~~
ashark
Other well-regarded games that are difficult to play without pirating them or
playing on aging equipment that will eventually stop working:

\- Goldeneye on the N64 — James Bond franchise rights issues. There was a
"reimagining" developed and release, but it's an entirely different game.

\- Panzer Dragoon Saga on the Sega Saturn — IIRC the source code was lost, and
a combination of that, Saturn emulation being tricky, the relatively small
number of highly in-demand exclusive releases for the Saturn, and Sega no
longer releasing their own consoles mean that official emulated Saturn support
for the title is unlikely.

[EDIT] I should add that the situation of these two games in particular is
made worse by the less-than-stellar state of open source emulation for those
systems, especially in the case of the Saturn. I think it's fair to say that
both are in a worse state than the Playstation, or even the newer Gamecube/Wii
thanks to Dolphin.

~~~
mynameisvlad
I was under the impression that N64 had fantastic emulators. I remember
playing several games in High School on an N64 emulator and they ran
perfectly.

~~~
ashark
Support is just very spotty, and one's experience will depend on the games one
tries to play, the platform the emulator's running on, game-specific config
settings, plugins in use, _et c_. In this regard it's barely advanced from
where it was years ago.

It's a system for which it is _unsurprising_ to encounter difficulties
emulating a given game, _even if it 's worked for you in the past_.

~~~
mynameisvlad
Ah, fair, I haven't kept up with how it has progressed (although I did see
that Project64's installer is now malware-ridden, that's sad) over the years
and I haven't played an N64 emulated game in a long time. I do remember a long
time ago that Dolphin wasn't _that_ great and had spotty game support, so they
must have really worked hard on it over the years.

~~~
oxide
I'm a big fan of the update blog posts they do over at Dolphin.

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ChuckMcM
So release the game, get sued tell the court the plaintiff has no standing
unless they can prove they own the game. Then once the courts have ruled who
"owns" it, settle with them by paying a licensing fee.

~~~
Floegipoky
If the company has to go through the pain of tracking down that contract after
initially refusing to, I'd expect that they wouldn't settle, both to send a
message and to try to squeeze out as much money as they can in damages.

~~~
ChuckMcM
Possibly, in reading the article it seemed that Activision, 20th Century, and
Warner could not agree on who owned the rights. As it mentioned that is
unresolvable directly (none of the three are publishing a new version or re-
using the content). So the only way to resolve the ownership question is to
draw a lawsuit, where either the courts will find that it has been abandoned
(win) or they argue amongst themselves and come up with one person who is the
owner.

I'm not a lawyer but if there is a writ you could file to have the courts
declare it abandoned, that would work too, perhaps @rayiner will step in on
that question.

~~~
icebraining
As far as I know, copyright doesn't expire even if the work is "abandoned" or
even "orphaned" (like when a company folds without transferring it). There
were two bills to change this, but neither went through:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works_in_the_United_Sta...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_works_in_the_United_States)

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chrisdotcode
What if the developers... forget to password-protect the server that hosts the
source code, installers, etc. Can the law touch cases of... negligence like
this?

~~~
rotw
If you don't mind breaking the law, it's probably a bit more efficient to just
torrent it.

~~~
DanBC
Currently very few people are seeding or leeching NOLF, which is a bit
surprising with this article.

[https://kat.cr/usearch/no%20one%20lives%20forever/](https://kat.cr/usearch/no%20one%20lives%20forever/)

~~~
rotw
Pirate Bay has 21 seeders but yeah, there's not exactly an abundance of peers
there. Really glad I picked up a bargain bin copy about 10 years ago

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mjpearson
If no-one can establish ownership and they have the source code and assets,
why not just release it? I'm sure if there were vested interests would lawyer
up and make themselves known pretty quickly. Clearly in this case it's easier
to ask for forgiveness rather than for permission

~~~
lmm
Activision and Fox aren't currently bothered enough to dig the contract out of
whatever box it's in. But if there were a guaranteed damages payment in it
they'd probably put a bit more effort in.

Honestly it sounds like Fox offered a pretty reasonable deal: "They [said
they] might or might not have physical records to support their position, and
the location of those records was not determined. So if we wanted to do a deal
that paid them enough as a kind of guarantee, they would look into their
records to see if they had anything. And if it turned out they didn't have
ownership, they would refund that up-front guarantee. We chose not to pursue
this option [and] they said, basically, 'Fine, whatever.'" I'm curious why
they (Night Dive) didn't want to take that.

~~~
egypturnash
My first guess is that the up-front money was more than Night Dive felt sure
they could make on it. Or more than they could afford to part with right now.

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bionsuba
The author of this article apparently feels the need to state every important
point twice.

    
    
      Last week, Night Dive founder Stephen Kick and director of 
      business development Larry Kuperman emailed me to let me 
      know that while they had indeed planned to re-release No 
      One Lives Forever and its sequel, they'd hit a wall and 
      been forced to give up. ... Night Dive is currently 
      abandoning its efforts to revive No One Lives Forever.

~~~
boeyms
I don't see why this is a problem. I am reminded of a comment that a friend
once made to the following effect: information theory tells us that redundancy
is the only way to guarantee transmission of information across over a noisy
channel.

I think he said that this came from the preface of a mathematics textbook,
where the author used this to criticise what he therefore viewed as the
unhelpful parsimony of many textbooks, but I think that the point holds in
general.

Of course, the style in which repetition is done may still be criticised for
poor aesthetics, but I don't see an aesthetic problem here either.

~~~
Filligree
Indeed, stating everything twice is a basic concept in education.

At least twice. "Twice" is the absolute minimum, and there are better or worse
ways to do it, but anything you only say once is only useful for a reference
text.

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michaelbuddy
Damn I was just thinking about this game 2 days ago in the car thinking they
must have resolved it by now.

NOLF will probably get remade as a mod or fan game.

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xigency
Wow, and I expected a story about StarCraft II. /s

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frik
I played No One Lives Forever 1+2 and its spinoff (Contract Jack) again in
2014. They are still superb games and run fine in Win7 x64 1080p.

Sadly, such long (40+ hours) single player first person shooter games that
offered a innovative gameplay, very good story and humour are a thing of the
past.

New games that focus on gameplay and learn why Deus Ex 1 and No One Lives
Forever 1 were such outstanding games, would be great. But such games can only
be created when creative game designers are let alone with enough cash, and no
business people in sight.

~~~
a-saleh
Deus Ex:HR and Dishonored sort of filled that void for me :-)

~~~
frik
Both were refreshing yes. I am seeing forward to the upcoming Dishonored 2.
But DX3 cannot be compared with DX1 on any level. The development of DX4
appearently took the wrong turn and additionally has been pushed back for
almost another year.

