‘No One Lives Forever’ Turns 25 & You Still Can’t Buy It Legitimately
from the abandonware dept
One of my favorite things in all of professional sports is the unofficial holiday referred to as “Bobby Bonilla Day.” The short version of it is that Bonilla played for the New York Mets decades ago and eventually bought out his contract in 2000 when they decided they were done with him. Rather than pay the $5.9 million buyout of the contract up front, the team instead made the bonkers decision to negotiate a deferred payment schedule for that amount with 8% interest over the course of 25 years. The result is that the Mets will be paying Bonilla $1.2 million per year every July 1st, starting in 2011 and ending in 2035. And if you can’t make sense of the math on that one, it’s because you aren’t aware that the Mets ownership was one of Bernie Madoff’s many victims, which is why they had to defer the payments.
November 10th is not Bobby Bonilla Day. But it should be named “Let Us Play No One Lives Forever, You Assholes Day.” The classic spy-shooter turned 25 on that date and, for the exact same reasons we’ve detailed for a god damned decade now, you still can’t buy the game.
Here’s the short of it. Due to a series of mergers, closures, and rights purchases, the IP rights for No One Lives Forever and its sequel have been potentially split into three pieces between Warner Bros., Activision, and 20th Century Fox, like it was some kind of fucking horcrux. I say potentially because nobody really knows who owns what, if anything, when it comes to these games. When one company, Nightdive Studios, attempted to remaster and re-release the game as they’ve done with other titles, along with securing trademark rights to the game which hasn’t been sold in over a decade, all three companies complained that they may have rights to it and may sue over it.
All of those qualifiers are, again, because even these companies themselves don’t know what rights they actually have. And why is that? Well, because the gaming rights deals were inked before digital storage was widely used for this sort of thing and, well, nobody seems to be able to locate the actual paperwork denoting who owns what. Here’s an example of an exchange Nightdive had with Activision.
“So we went back to Activision and, [after] numerous correspondence going back and forth, they replied that they thought they might have some rights, but that any records predated digital storage. So we’re talking about a contract in a box someplace.” Kuperman laughed. “The image I get is the end of Indiana Jones… somewhere in a box, maybe in the bowels of Activision, maybe it was shipped off to Iron Mountain or somewhere. And they confessed, they didn’t have [their] hands on it. And they weren’t sure that they even had any of those rights.”
Which didn’t keep Activision from warning Nightdive that it might totally sue if it moved forward with remastering the game. The other companies made similar noises.
So what’s a person to do if they want to play this game? You can’t buy it legitimately currently. It’s not even for sale anywhere. And a situation like that, which I’ve stated before, completely breaks the copyright bargain. The only option is, as Kotaku of all places notes, to download it for free from somewhere.
Downloading games that are available for sale is piracy. It’s illegal, and it’s not supportive of developers and their art. But when companies have gone out of their way to refuse to take your money for a game for the better part of two decades, it’s a very different situation. Look, I’m not your real mom and dad, and I can’t tell you what to do. But if you were to click on this link (link removed by Techdirt due to us not knowing where it takes you) and download both games (as well as spin-off Contract Jack), you’d end up with modernized versions of these classic games, with mods that allow them to work on Windows 10 and 11, and in widescreen. And what better time to do (or not do) this than on the first game’s 25th anniversary?
At this point (as indeed it was over eight years ago, the last time I suggested just downloading it, to no negative response at all) we have to consider No One Lives Forever to be abandonware. No one is willing to take ownership of it, although those that could do so sometimes mindlessly threaten to intervene should anyone else try to rebuild it for sale. Nightdive were scared off a decade ago, and it’s been sitting on GOG’s Dreamlist since that launched earlier this year (with 87,171 people saying they’d pay for it if they could). It’s far too small of a concern for any of the megacorps who might own it to spend the time and money to work out if they do, but it’s far too big of a concern within gaming history to be allowed to just disappear. Thank goodness for the anonymous heroes running NOLF Revival. I thank them for their service.
It’s the only option the public has to play this game and enjoy this small piece of our collective culture. The real answer here is some sort of copyright reform that makes this situation not a thing. If a company, or group of companies, won’t offer a piece of work for sale, can’t be bothered to understand what they own of it, if anything, and have no plans to figure any of that out… then how can this be copyright infringement?
So happy “Let Us Play No One Lives Forever, You Assholes” Day. Maybe we’ll be able to play this game legitimately by the time Bobby Bonilla stops making his million and change per year.
Filed Under: copyright, ip rights, no one lives forever, video games
Companies: 20th century fox, activision, microsoft, nightdive, warner bros.
Comments on “‘No One Lives Forever’ Turns 25 & You Still Can’t Buy It Legitimately”
Ahh, a refreshing bit of optimism in these dark times!
Re:
I don’t really agree it’s optimistic. Why does “legitimacy” depend on us giving money to assholes? Why should we go so far as to seek them out and force them to take our money? What does it mean to “buy” digital data anyway?
I say it is legitimate to download games for free online. It’s not in any way related to “piracy”, and we shouldn’t be treating it as somehow “wrong”. There’s certainly no need to lament our inability to find some corporate overlord to give money to.
The best copyright reform would be abolition. But I don’t see why we should wait for legislators, who are out of touch and are anyway in bed with corporate interests, to realize this. We could stop giving money to copyright maximalists right now.
IANAL, but I’d say just release and let them sue.
If they can’t find the documentation during discovery, case dismissed. Maybe even counter-sue for legal fees.
Re:
But then they have an incentive to look for the paperwork. they don’t have any particular reason to go looking right now but if they see money and a lawsuit they’ll assign someone to start digging.
You could be in for a really big payout to them.
So it would be a gamble, and the potential payoff is probably not worth the risk you would be taking.
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You didn’t need to add that first part, it’s implied.
Isn’t it funny.
If you couldn’t prove you own your house the rich would you you and your family dead in the streets instantly.
If they can’t prove they own the ip. No one is allowed to ever touch it.
All the rich need to die like the evil pedophiles they are.
I am baffled why we make intellectual property as legally upheld as physical property, and yet we still end up with these areas that are so untouchably gray area nobody can do anything.
In terms of physical property gray areas, there are certainly disputed areas, but almost nowhere on Earth do people avoid due to the ambiguity. The only real example I know is Bir Tawil.
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It happens all the time in physical property; the most sterotypical example would be inheritance law, but it regularly shows up in business as well (most commonly small businesses, partnerships, S corps, etc, though also in areas like bankuptcy proceedings for larger businessnesses, and certainly when things become transnational).
Perhaps the main point of commonality for areas where this is common is the old cliche; possession may not literally be 9/10 of the law, but it certainly has a major impact. Whenever it is not really an option to rule on physical possession, ownership of anything routinely becomes exactly the gray area you complain of.
As for your example regarding physical land claims by govenments, that’s a funny joke. There are massive areas of land whose ownership is “untouchably gray” and are generally avoided. Your example is only notable in that nobody is currently dying over it.
Re: Re:
What does “it” refer to, and what is inheritance law an example of? Disputes?
In my view, inheritance law is meant to simplify property-ownership after death. If we didn’t have it, people would come up with ways to simulate it, such as having a trust or corporation own their property. And the courts would have to waste time dealing with that.
Sure, there are sometimes minor gray areas, but “untouchably gray” is quite uncommon. If some property was known to be owned by the dead person, and its new ownership is unclear, a court will resolve that. If you find some real estate you want to buy, you can get an ownership record for it; if the owner can’t be contacted, you can squat there, and the usual worst case in that you’ll eventually get evicted (and the best case is that, after maybe a decade or two, you become the legal owner). With copyright, there’s no way to tell who, if anyone, holds the rights; if it does turn out to be owned, anyone using the material could be hit with statutory damages of $150,000, and that risk persists for like 150 years.
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It would be interesting to see something like adverse possession. Like, if it’s been openly distributed as abandonware for 10 years without complaint, it becomes public-domain. (Not that 10-year-old stuff has any business being copyrighted anyway.)
Those NOLF IP “feeling unproductive, might litigate later… idk <3<3<3” hogging assholes can burn in… molten lava? Very nice.
The fact that the link in the article is indeed a valid, working dedicated site for hosting “pirated” copies of these games and it hasn’t been taken down in nearly a decade says a lot about how much the potential “rightsholders” genuinely do not give a damn about this series.
Feels like copyright law should have stipulations for cases like this, especially considering how long terms are right now – corporations shouldn’t be sitting on copyrights doing absolutely nothing with them like dragon hoards.
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They don’t care enough to get a judgement on some random internet site- but if there was a potential to demand a nice slice carved off of GOG then you bet they would be digging through those metaphorical or literal boxes.
No one lives forever question
Is that the song from the opening in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 with Top Chop and Leatherface?
Prolly should just call their bluff. If they don’t have a contract in a box, well, sucks to be them.
No-one plays…forever. Well, legally anyway.
The only games are being played by the corporations, and played so poorly that EVERYONE loses.
Tim, your comments and the comments on here about “how can this be copyright infringement” indicate that culturally, we now live in a world where both the reason for copyright and the use of copyright are strongly at odds with the LEGAL thing that is copyright.
If someone creates something, copyright gives them, for a limited time, control over who can make copies, in exchange for encouragement to create works in the first place knowing that there will be a period of exclusivity on creating those copies.
In this case, the work is already created, and the owners of the rights are essentially saying “we know that we own some bits of this, and we want to enforce our exclusivity.” That’s fully within their rights, and could be (tenuously) argued to be part of what convinced the original rightsholders to create the game (and then sell the rights).
What annoys me more is when an original creator writes something, sells the copyright, and then is prevented from creating new works by the new rights holder who has no intention of creating anything new themselves, but is using the copyright instead as a tool to restrict the marketplace, pumping up the value of unrelated and already created works. This is the exact OPPOSITE of the intention behind copyright.
What was that com[panies name.
The One that is and Aint in Australia, that Pops up a Store every few years, that Doent sell anything, it JUST stands there, to KEEP the Rights to the company name.
Re: Can you see
Having to store 1 copy of a program SOMEPLACE, forever to keep your rights.
Would a staggered limited release help? Put it out there, limit it to 10000 physical copies for each year for three years until a general unlimited releaseso that the statute of limitations is done, the copyright indicia says 2028 or 2029.
This whole mess could be solved by bibliographical citations of the games human creators and the companies who own the rights can have the licensing issues solved by “All copyrights to their respective owners”
This goes back years
For what it’s worth – I worked at Vivendi Games when they bought Fox Interactive. One of the things I did in my time there was help get Vivendi’s titles onto digital distribution platforms (the old Sierra catalogue, etc). This is back in maybe 2002 or 2003 and predates both Activision and Warner Bros. We couldn’t touch NOLF or Contract Jack because no one could figure out if we owned them back then. It was unclear if the rights to the games came over in the purchase and at the time the business for back catalogue sales wasn’t big enough that anyone bothered digging into it.