Hi,

I saw that an old game I made has been wish listed here and I would love to have it be added to GOG.

The problem is that the company who made it and that I worked for is long gone and I have no idea who actually owns the license to the game now.

Where would I even start to investigate who owns it? Is this something that GOG themselves can help with?

I'm pretty sure I'd be able to provide a patch to make the game compatible with modern computers.

If it's the company that you worked for, start with contacts like the last known owners of the company. Depending on the country the company was located in, there may also be public records of transfer of ownership of company assets, from courts in the district that the business was located in or local/county/state/national Department/Ministry of Business.

I doubt they would want to do that; just because you could probably get the game working on modern computers, that does not automatically mean GOG would be interested in selling your game on their store.

GOG "curates" the games they sell, and rejects the ones that they don't want to sell from being sold on GOG.


It wouldn't make sense, financially speaking, for them to spend their time & money trying to help someone find the IP owners of a game that they don't even know that they'd want to sell. And they also wouldn't know if you could resolve the legal limbo even if you did track down the owners, which would give GOG even less incentive to get involved with helping you in that regard.

Can you find the credits for the people who actually worked on the game? Like a director or similar. (maybe on Mobygames) If you can find some of the main people (find their names, then see if you can politely contact them via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.), they may be able to help.

And yeah try SCPM's advice also

Some clarification would be welcome here. Did you write the game yourself (and then license it to a company) or were you part of the team that wrote it?

If you were the sole author, and used a "standard" contract to license it, then it may be that the copyright granted to the company reverted to you on their closure, in which case you can contact GOG as the rights-holder.

Otherwise, the advice offered by previous posters is your best bet.GOG have recently added some very old games to their catalogue so there is still a willingness to track down gaming classics.

As such, GOG's viewpoint is likely to depend on how good the OP's game was, and the level of wishlist interest in it.

Thank you,

I've just tried to search for some information about that on various government web sites but it's really hard to find anything.

I guess I'll just keep trying. Maybe those organisations have some support that can help. Yes, I see.

I was hoping that since they've have some experience with this they might have some documentation or tips on how to approach it. I know most of the development team, but none of them have any ideas unfortunately.

The owner of the company seems to have completely disappeared, I can't find any info about him. I was the lead programmer. It was a team of about 10 people all in all who worked on the game. Half were regular employees and the rest were contractors.

I believe the company we worked for owns the license as no publisher was involved until the very end, and then it was different publishers for different regions around the world.

You know, there may not actually be a licence holder if the owner seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. Re-Volt's previous owners (We Go Interactive) have all but vanished off the face of the earth with all major holdings now in the hands of someone in Korea.

You can imagine how hard it may be to wrest the rights back from a creditor somewhere in Korea, but easier still to run a scream test.

Which in technical parlance means to test something to see if anyone runs up screaming. (In context of server reboots or service shutdowns.)

I'm not entirely sure how reclamation of property works in Sweden as I feel it's one of those special case things, and it casts a broad question. I know of a DOS screensaver, Razzle-Dazzle. The company went defunct in 2005 due to a tax forfeiture. Does that mean there's some tax attorney in Texas who now owns the rights to Dazzle, or does the family still control the property?

Have you tried the chamber of commerce?