Often, the first step is to approach the
original developers.
Marta Adamska: I come from the
perspective that the creator is the one
who is going to care most, and [is the]
most likely to know where the rights
remain. Then I go to the publisher, who
has probably gone
bankrupt. But
nothing disappears
when it comes to
rights. They’re
there somewhere,
and someone
must have
inherited or
acquired them.
That was the case for the Forgotten
Realms games. They were really
difficult. They were journeys through
pain, but Oleg managed to find all the
people who were involved. He worked
for years to make that happen.
“IT TOOKYEARS,
EXPLAININGTHAT
WE’RE NOTSOME
SHADY COMPANY”Dune II is one of the
more requested
games on GOG’s
community wishlist.
a deal, and it took one or two years,
explaining that we’re not some shady
company. We were surprised by what
we found there, including the rights for
the code to the Forgotten Realms
games! I thought they’d gone to Ubisoft.Not everyone sees the appeal of
bringing old games back from limbo.
Marta Adamska: With one game, I
can’t say which, we found all the rights
had reverted to the developer. We found
him and one of the team added him on
LinkedIn, but there was no reply. We
looked through forums, and through
some weird old website found his email
address and wrote to him. But his
daughter replied and sadly, she said
he’d died five years ago. We said we’d
love to release the game, and she had
no clue about games whatsoever. I
guess for her it was too high a barrier
in terms of understanding what it was
all about.Then there were the Dune games.
We’d all love to see Dune II come
back, right?
Marta Adamska: Oh my god, we’ve
spoken to so many people who
were even remotely engaged in
the process of creating
Dune II. Westwood was
involved and as it
turned out, not all the
rights went to EA
when they bought
them. Some code rights
went to some of the actual
programmers, but they were
residual so we’d need to sign with
both them and EA. Talking to EA is
always a huge process because they’reOleg Klapovsky: I was always a fan of
the Eye of the Beholder games, and I
always wondered who had the rights.
People always told me that they were
part of this merger and that acquisition,
but when I checked I couldn’t find proof.
I was talking a lot to Wizards of the
Coast at the time,
and I asked them,
since it was their
IP, if they knew
who worked on it.
They gave some
hints and I started
talking to some
producers and
ex-owners and
slowly, step-by-step, we came to a
company that has nothing to do with
games nowadays that just had all these
old titles lying around. They’d forgotten
about them!
We asked if they were willing to make