Rights

This has surely been brought up before, but searching a large forum is a bit like searching your entire load of unlabelled moving boxes for this one charging cable that could be in any of them.

Is there a comprehensive overview somewhere depicting who currently owns the rights of the individual games from Infocom, Magnetic Scrolls, Level 9 and Legend Entertainment? I’m mainly asking out of pure curiosity, but if there’s more than “is rumoured to belong…” to it then the respective Wikipedia articles could be updated (with a reliable source, that is).

Infocom are footnotes in the Activision catalogue; Magnetic Scrolls titles are currently being remastered by Strand Games, and I don’t think that anyone else has currently active claims on any other classic IF publishers. (ICOM games to Zojoi, whatever is the new version of inXile probably has claims on Interplay games which nobody misses.)

Hitchhiker’s and Shogun are “rumored to belong to” the estates of Douglas Adams and James Clavell. I’ve never seen a confirmation of that, but Activision stopped republishing them around 1995, and Douglas Adams began hosting HHGG on his own web site. So we make assumptions.

Hi there!

Yes, over at strandgames.com we’re remastering the works of Magnetic Scrolls. We’ve just re-released “The Guild of Thieves” for all platforms, except iOS which we hope to bring out real soon.

We’re also releasing the original source codes for the games and the tools, here: gitlab.com/strandgames

Currently working sources are there for “The Pawn” and “The Guild of Thieves”, but only the f23 files for the others at this time (because the sources for the others does not build yet…)