Recently I am not finding anything in searches for the DARKLANDS store page on GOG, nor do I see it listed in the products there associated with "MPSLabs", Retroism or NightDive Studios.I also am not finding it listed on the web pages of Retroism.com or Tommo Inc. (Tommo being the IP owner of Darklands when forming Retroism in partnership with NnightDive.) However, NightDivev still lists Darklands in its portfolio. And, in contrast, at this time Valve's Steam Powered storefront still lists Darklands as being for sale there. (Actually, Steam has always been the preferred link to buy Darklands on the NightDive site.)

Fortunately (so far), the game has not as yet been removed from my existing inventory!

Anyway, I'm wondering if there's something specific that has happened for GOG to pull Darklands from its storefront? Is there something legal involved, and we're just waiting for "the other shoe to drop" on Steam? Has IP ownership changed hands? Perhaps Arnold Hendrick has gained IP control? That could be a scenario I would accept. The Tommo+NighDive=Retroism partnership, to this point, has been very good for the stewardship of the Darklands IP.


I would really like to solve this puzzle. I have a couple of sites that focus exclusively on this game, so there is some (100% voluntary) skin involved in it here for me.

Thanks for your time folks!

-Matt Wirkkala (mwirkk)
Darklands Domain webmeister
Darklands FAQ host
Darklands Group/Discussion List admin

I have made a search in Galaxy and from the web and, correct, the game has dissapeared.

When game rights do change hands the game use to be retired from the store but the owned copies remain in your account, so do not worry about this except for the further updates that being a so old game shouldnt be a very common.

In the other hand gog used to communicate the retirement of any title, not the case, but I do not know how much time this situation exists. Or if it is temporally.

In some cases the game use to come back if the rights are renegotiated, I wish. I wish

Thanks for the feedback, Gudadantza!

Thats terrible, i almost bought it last month and now its gone. I feel gutted. I don't really want to get the steam version i heard the gog version ran better.

There's a parallel thread in General Discussions: https://www.gog.com/forum/general/darklands_gone_from_the_store

NOTE: The following message was cross-posted with the thread previously mentioned in the General Discussions section.

Sometime within the past few days on Steam the listed Publisher there for DARKLANDS changed from "Retroism/NightDive" to "Ziggurat." Therre's a Ziggurat Games with a board game entitled "World War IV", but I'm not sure whether they're one and the same. There's a zigguratgames.com domain from GoDaddy, but only is only parked with no actual company web-site, per se. Does anybody know anything at all about this Ziggurat?

A change in publisher would very well explain it's disappearance from GOG. Let's hope this is temporary and something get's worked out. I wouldn't think "DRM" should be an issue, since Retroism (Tommo+NightDive) should have already had that worked out previously.

From the rest of the games for which they appear as publishers, it just seems they had some money and decided to buy the rights for a few games.

By the way, Slave Zero is on that list and it was also for sale at GOG and is not anymore, so it's very likely all the games they are publishing where pulled from GOG. Maybe there are other less popular ones as well?

There is this Iranian dev by the name Ziggurat, and even if its a long shot, it sounds much more plausible for them to be this Ziggurat than a board game company:
http://www.zigguratgame.ir/EN/index.html

I think I've found it...

It looks likely that it's a (new?) subsidiary or division of COSMI/ValuSoft, called Ziggurat Interactive, Inc. The titles listed for Ziggurat on Steam and the catalogs of Cosmi ValuSoft line up. In addition, on the Tommo Inc. website (the last confirmed owners of the Darklands IP that I knew of -- since July 2013), ValuSoft Cosmi is listed as one of their publishing partners through their Retroism brand. This is echoed on the Retroism site as well.

On MobyGames there's a company listing for Ziggurat Interactive that published a couple of Mobile, Sony and Nintendo ports in 2006-2007, but I can't be sure (yet) that the two entities are related. (There was also a Zigurat Software S.L., spelled with a single "G", that published 8-bit titles in the 80's, but they haven't been active since 1992.)

So, the proverbial fruit may not have fallen so far from the tree, after all. But details are still sketchy. Not much has been confirmed, so it's partly conjecture. Hopefully more to come...


Btw- I've also posted this update on the relevant threads on the Steam Darklands boards, and on the Darklands group list at: https://groups.io/g/darklands, and I'll cross-post once again on the parallel thread here on GOG.

Dareios90 has posted on the GOG Wishlist board a plea to bring Darklands back: https://www.gog.com/wishlist/games/darklands

Please add your messages of support if you too would like to see Darklands on GOG again soon. I've added mine! :)

Thanks!
-mwirkk

Done! Have you been able to dig up anything else on the publishing company? Is there anyone we could contact to make inquiries?

Note: I'm also posting this response to the Darklands group on Groups.IO (GIO).

It appears that with the new year Ziggurat Interactive (the new publisher listed for Darklands on Steam) has finally breached the surface of that great ocean named the Internet.

See from 'Swedrami' on the thread in the General forums:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/darklands_gone_from_the_store/?search=darklands

Swedrami lists these URLs for Ziggurat

https://zigguratinteractive.com
https://www.facebook.com/zigguratinteractive
https://twitter.com/playziggurat

Not much content there yet, but the little bit of text that can be seen on the as of now still sparse GoDaddy-parked web-site is intriguing. It reveals teasers like these...

JUST FOR THE FUN OF IT

REMEMBER REMASTER RERELEASE REIMAGINE

A new (and old) kind of video game company.

ZIGGUART(TM)
We are a new video game company. So new, in fact, that we haven't even started developing any. That's because in 2020, we're headed back to the future--to remember, remaster, and rerelease games from the annals of history. It's research for what's to come.
Learn more --> ziggurat.games

If you go to WWW DOT ziggurat DOT games you will see a complete list of their games and they are all available on steam or coming to steam soon. The website provided above presents certificates that do not belong to the domain directed to and firefox warns against visiting the site.

It looks like Steam has made a deal with these people but GoG has not yet done so or the steam deal is exclusive.

I don't like the silence and sneaky take down of games that GoG has done. It would be nice to know what is going on.

Yes, you are correct. It looks pretty official now that Darklands is under the Ziggurat umbrella now. The new official website is https://www.ziggurat.games/. (Their FB page indicates they updated their homepage URL on 2/18/2020.) I still don't know all the details. Whether Ziggurat has it outright, or under some kind of agreement. Or what the relationship between Ziggurat and NightDive, Tommo and Retroism might be, if any.

NightDive retweeted an article from ShackNews published Tues. March 3rd, 2020 of an Interview with Ziggurat about their mission, https://www.shacknews.com/article/116668/ziggurat-interactive-aims-to-bring-back-classic-games-exclusive-interview

Also, from Indie Retro News, http://www.indieretronews.com/2020/03/ziggurat-interactive-plans-to-remaster.html . They say they were alerted thru Blues News: https://www.bluesnews.com/s/208675/three-game-remasters-announced

I have yet to see the actual "Press Release" that was mentioned in the ShackNews interview. If anyone stumbles across it, please pass it along.

Thx!
-mwirkk

Here you go:
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/03/03/1994352/0/en/New-Gaming-Publisher-Ziggurat-Interactive-to-Bring-Massive-List-of-Classic-and-New-Games-to-Modern-Platforms.html

Thanks Links!

Yah, EOD yesterday I was doing a general search and found that exact info verbatim on atleast 20 other sites (I stopped looking at that point), so I figured that must have been the contents of the actual PR. Perhaps they'll start publishing their news on their own site soon.