Blood resurrection plan halted by Atari uninterest
Former Monolith CEO Jace Hall's campaign to resurrect the studio's first game, gory FPS Blood, has been shot down by current rights-holder Atari. Hall had spoken of revamping and updating Blood, like how fans have reworked the Doom engine, not only for PC but other platforms too, and cryptically teased further plans.
Former Monolith CEO Jace Hall's campaign to resurrect the studio's first game, gory FPS Blood, has been shot down by current rights-holder Atari. Hall had spoken of revamping and updating Blood, like how fans have reworked the Doom engine, not only for PC but other platforms as well. He cryptically teased further plans too.
"I just got an unusually short, one sentence e-mail from Atari, letting me know that given the current set of circumstances, they are choosing to decline to proceed," Hall wrote on Blood fan forum The Postmortem last Thursday (via Polygon). "Obviously, I am disappointed. Particularly given Atari's continued encouragement along with the amount of time, effort and correspondence that I have put into this venture."
Started by 3D Realms but finished and released by Monolith in 1997, Blood was famous for its violence, Lovecraftian tinge, and weird and wonderful weapons. Former cultist cowboy Caleb was armed with a flare gun, voodoo doll, sawed-off shotgun, aerosol can flamethrower, and other novel ways to reduce men and monsters to piles of parts or ash. And, as was customary for 3D Realms games of the era, he'd spout quips and pop culture references. A sequel, Blood 2: The Chosen, followed in 1998; it was not as good.
Hall first revealed his plans in August, seeking community support. "I am thinking of bringing the ORIGINAL Blood game back as it was, with functionality alterations/enhancements that are similar but superior to ZDAEMON's. I would also make it work on all platforms, and not just PC," he wrote.
"There are other things as well..." he teased.
While Hall does already have a copy of the source code himself, he stated in August that he couldn't and wouldn't release or build upon it without approval. Which isn't coming.
He concluded on Thursday, "The only thing that can be done at this point is to wait and see what happens with Atari, and hope that they find themselves in a position and mindset to allow my efforts to continue on this matter at a future date." Oh dear.
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Alice O'Connor posted a new article, Blood resurrection plan halted by Atari uninterest.
Former Monolith CEO Jace Hall's campaign to resurrect the studio's first game, gory FPS Blood, has been shot down by current rights-holder Atari. Hall had spoken of revamping and updating Blood, like how fans have reworked the Doom engine, not only for PC but other platforms too, and cryptically teased further plans.-
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To protect the integrity of the material until such a time as it is primed for peak public re-exploration. Can't let jokes or idealists get involved.
Now, as to why they would care enough to squash an idealist's branching of the game just to sit on Blood, a series that basically no one cares about anymore? Because I think he was talking about releasing the game for free, which might chew into their GOG residuals.
I mean, of course the easy fix is to not give away the full game. Just release the engine update with the shareware version, and set it up so that if you want the full one, you need to copy over the .grp or point to it. But I'm sure it's just easier for Atari to say, "Naw." -
Probably because there is often work required to make sure that all the ownership rights are ironed.
First off, the legal team probably doesn't want to go to the trouble to give away the company's IP because they don't want to make more work for themselves and who wants to make more work for themselves if they don't have to? And even if they did, it could be that the rights to the game are all tied up and the lawyers would have to spends lots of time to go through all the original contracts and the contracts from when the original company was sold and what rights some now defunct company that did a port or a multiplayer feature or whatever might have.
Monolith didn't hold on to the rights of most of their stuff which is why Blood, Shogo, No One Lives Forever, and their other fondly remembered games are unlikely to be remade or rebooted any time soon. -
we need to reform compulsory license laws so they're usable more frequently and with software and other things like that. then people can make their blood game or whatever without permission and then pay the rights owner
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license
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