18. July 2011, 19:18:01

#15

MichaelQuote

I raised a similar question over on the Irrational Games forum...

"I noticed that the situation regarding the rights to System Shock 2 is similar to the one faced by the original Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis. With respect to the latter, Bohemia Interactive Studios owned the rights to the game whereas their publisher Codemasters owned the rights to the franchise name.

With an eventual split between the two companies Bohemia continued making Flashpoint games under the name 'ARMA' in a manner similar to how Irrational has gone on to make spiritual successors under the Bioshock name whereas Codemasters attempted to create their own series of poor imitations under the Flashpoint name.

For the past decade a rerelease of the original Flashpoint looked like an impossibility so long as Codemasters continued to own the rights to the Flashpoint name... that is, until this past May when Bohemia decided to rebrand Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis as Arma: Cold War Assault (thereby bypassing the title rights Codemasters held).

Bohemia was then able to include the original game as part of their ARMA X: Anniversary Edition that has since seen a release on several digital distribution services including Steam. The game remains the same as the original from 2001 except for a new patch which has removed any titles or references to Flashpoint replacing them with the Arma title and logo.

Anyways, I was wondering whether or not this is something that Irrational Games could do with System Shock 2. Would rereleasing the game under another name allow Irrational to avoid violating any rights that EA has as a publisher to the System Shock series or does EA own more than just the game title? Thoughts?"

I wonder if this could be a possible course of action for Levine and Irrational Games.

18. July 2011, 20:44:39

#16

KolyaQuote

Currently Irrational doesn't own the rights either. Also it's not clear what EA's sleeping trademark included. May have been more than just the game title, eg SHODAN, Von Braun, Citadel, you name it. In that case re-branding wouldn't be enough. It would require to re-record audiologs, change textures, rewrite the plot. That's a lot of work and then you can't change a game like that and go on to re-sell it as an old classic, which didn't sell to begin with. Where's the money in that?
So instead, why not redo the whole game in a new engine, neatly sidestepping trademark and development rights holders? Keep the general plot and gameplay but change the setting to avoid infringing anything and ... Is it too soon to whisper Oscar?

19. July 2011, 17:22:40

#17

EnchantermonQuote

Quote by Kolya:

So instead, why not redo the whole game in a new engine, neatly sidestepping trademark and development rights holders? Keep the general plot and gameplay but change the setting to avoid infringing anything and ... Is it too soon to whisper Oscar?

They did that. It's called Bioshock.

18. August 2011, 12:43:00

#18

LudogatorQuote

Quote by Enchantermon:

They did that. It's called Bioshock.

Bioshock, even if it was a great game, still wasn't what I expected.

I'm supresed how this topic died so quickly.

24. August 2011, 00:29:02

#19

bakagamiQuote

another approach would be to just do away with then System Shock name entirely.  Call it something else