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How One Company Is Bringing Old Video Games Back From the Dead (fastcompany.com)
harrymcc writes: Night Dive Studios is successfully reviving old video games — not the highest-profile best-sellers of the past, but cult classics such as System Shock 2, The 7th Guest, Strife, and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. It's a job that involves an enormous amount of detective work to track down rights holders as well as the expected technical challenges. Over at Fast Company, Jared Newman tells the story of how the company stumbled upon its thriving business. "Kick didn’t have money on hand to buy the rights, so he scraped together contract work with independent developers and funneled the proceeds into the project. ... Some efforts fall apart even without the involvement of media conglomerates. In early 2014, Kick tried to revive Dark Seed, a point-and-click adventure game that featured artwork by H.R. Giger. But after Giger’s sudden death, demands from the artist’s estate escalated, and the negotiations derailed. ... But for every one of those failures, there’s a case where a developer or publisher is thrilled to have a creation back on store shelves."
Forgive me if I'm missing something, but this seems to be exactly what GOG has been doing for years. Are they remaking them?
It's a nightmare. I have a piece of music I want to put on my next album. It contains speech from an old BBC programme (1982), so to release it I need to get in touch with the copyright holder. But who actually is that?
The BBC told me to try Getty, because they'd sold off a lot of things to Getty. Getty told me they didn't know, and to contact the original narrator and the scriptwriter for that narrator. I have no idea who the scriptwriter was and, whilst I imagine I could find the narrator I doubt he'd know either. Result? This piece of music will never be released, simply because I cannot find who to ask (and those I did ask do not seem sure of their answers). That's exactly analogous to the problem they're describing in the article - actually finding who to ask, let alone getting a co-ordinated yes/no decision, is just much harder than people might imagine it to be.
It's really System Shock (1) that needs the remake. Even with the mouselook patch, the controls are archaic and clumsy. It doesn't live up to the standards that modern FPS games strive to.
From the Article
One example: Night Dive is developing a full remake of the original System Shock, going well beyond the basic rerelease that launched a couple months ago. Night Dive has acquired the full rights to the franchise, and Kick says he’s been working with Robert Waters, the game's original concept artist, to reimagine his designs from the early 1990s.
As a former avid City of Heroes player, I wish that someone would do this for shuttered MMORPGs. There are so many, and unlike single-player games that will at least run on old hardware and/or OSes, shuttered MMORPGs are completely inaccessible by any means. (Well, other than server emulators, for the very, VERY few that are lucky enough to have them.)
A while back, I wrote an email to GoG basically telling them that I wish they'd consider approaching some of the publishers of shuttered MMORPGs and offering to host them, either buying the rights to the games outright or licensing them, and charging $10 or $15 per month for access to everything (or offer cheaper plans for limited access to one or some games). Because the playerbase of many of these games would be a lot smaller than the new flashy hotness MMORPGs, it probably wouldn't take that much in the way of hardware, and if they could negotiate access to the source code, they might even be able to rewrite parts of the game to run more efficiently or even release updates. I got back a response that boiled down to, "Thanks, but we're not going to do that."
I still think it's a market that's ripe, and someone at some point will exploit that and make a killing off of it.
Hmm... Anyone got some negotiating skills that could pair with my technical skills to get this done?