I'd imagine Warner Bros wasn't thrilled that Night Dive snatched the trademarks to all the games, and then wanted to make a deal with them. Warner Bros is already a major publisher, with a wider reach than Night Dive, and Night Dive wouldn't actually be doing the fixing up work themselves but contracting others, so other than the fact that N.D. has the trademarks, they don't really offer Warner anything that they can't get done themselves.

Possibly but I looked for anything about it in this forum and the archived forum and didn't find anything. If you can find any references to it on this site, I'd like to see them, so that possibly I can figure out why my searches didn't find it.

That's really the problem. Unless somebody has a strong sense that they own the rights to the game, there's no incentive for them to look into it. Doing so can be rather expensive and you don't even know if you'll even own the rights, let alone how well you can get the game running on newer hardware.

Well...............time to search for it in boxes in warehouses. :P

Oh damn I didn't realize that ND has the trademarks now. Ah well.

It makes me wonder how one could actually get access to big publishers' vaults. I can (kind of) imagine GOG Los Angeles sending some knowledgeable staff over to Burbank to rummage through WB's vaults every once in a while if WB let them. ;) Same with Activision and other Cali big-name publishers. (might be the only way we ever see any Activision classics here again :P)

Sigh*

This really is the shitty part of the situation - recreating Cate is just as impossible as rereleasing Cate :(

I still have physical copies of both, but as had been pointed out already, they can be difficult to run on modern OS's.

Just release the damn thing.

If subsequently someone manages to untangle the copyright clusterfuck, strike a deal or barring that remove it from the stores again. If no one does, all the better.

And while you're at it, lobby for a change in copyright law: If there is an interested party and no one can or cares to sort out a copyright situation within say 12 months of the initial request, the property becomes public domain.

They don't. They applied, but, via TESS as of a day ago: Warners filed a motion to oppose and trademark abandoned. Well, never granted in the first place technically but it says abandoned.

That was then. A lot has changed in 15 years. Monolith was acquired by WBIE, for one thing.

And as has been pointed out a lot, EULAs often contain a lot of invalid bluster.

The article is from February apparently, and there were discussions about that here too.

Someone suggested (hoped?) that the reason Night Dive was unable to acquire the rights for NOLF was because GOG.com was in the talks getting them instead. Wishful thinking at this point, maybe.

Nowadays it seems GOG and ND are partly competing with each other, trying to acquire the rights for some lost games, e.g. GOG.com acquired the SSI games while ND acquired many others; yet at the same time they do some collaboration as well.

That. If the rights holders treated their IP so sloppy they even forgot who really owns it, customers have a moral right use the game without paying upfront and shifting the payment to a later point when the game might be sold again. In short: If they can't be bothered then it's fair game.

Also, what does one learn from it? Never divide rights, always keep them together at one place, otherwise selling stuff becomes a legal nightmare.
But who should do it? You? Me? Someone else?

If the rights are distributed, everyone and noone could release it?

My first thought was: how cool it would be to "play" NOLF and go pry through the possible warehouses, illegally but stealthily, then if one finds it, take a digital copy and send it to the right person(s) who can "make things happen".

Sequel was bad and did not sell, series died.