That was the case for the Forgotten Realms games. They’re there somewhere, and someone must have inherited or acquired them.
But nothing disappears when it comes to rights. Then I go to the publisher, who has probably gone bankrupt. Marta Adamska: I come from the perspective that the creator is the one who is going to care most, and most likely to know where the rights remain. Often, the first step is to approach the original developers. It’s insanely complicated to track it all. There are games where we’ve signed five-way agreements, and some rights went to one party and are blocked by another. But the rights for what? The code? The IP? The character, the music? Actually, every one is separate. Some agreements are written in a way where after a certain amount of time the rights revert to the developer. Marta Adamska: With classic titles, most rights are lost between companies, liquidation, bankruptcies, mergers and acquisitions. Marta Adamska is head of bizdev at GOG, which entails a great deal of sleuthing to find the people who own the rights to classic games so GOG can sell them. Marta Adamska: The signature took ages and at the end of the day they said, screw it, it’s old titles anyway, it’s going to be fine, and it was! Now they’re one of our awesome, awesome partners. For Interplay, GOG was an easy deal because they couldn’t sell these titles anywhere else. Oleg Klapovsky: Interplay were different, because the only rights they had were rights for super-old games, and some of them weren’t sold anywhere. The holy grail to find a company to sign up took seven or eight months we knocked on every door. I mean, their games were pirated anyway! But it proved not to be so easy. Piotr Karwowski: As a distributor, CD Projekt knew a lot of companies Ubisoft and Blizzard, so we were certain they’d agree. Over the course of 2007, GOG the platform was steadily built, and everyone at CD Projekt loved it. There’s a Terry Pratchett quote I love dearly, which goes, ‘The vital ingredient of success is not knowing that what you attempt cannot be done.’
I’m pretty sure that if we had industry veterans on the team, they’d have told us to drop the whole idea, but we were naive and it worked. And I know this will sound counterintuitive but I think it was the biggest blessing for GOG.
#Soldier of fortune 1 win 10 wont install how to
We had to figure out how to get it to work. Piotr Karwowski: Back then there were no cloud services and the people we hired had no experience of digital distribution.