‘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.