It’s certainly not an absence of demand that keeps “dead” games like Black & White or the original Civilization off the market. It’s usually red tape and nebulous barriers involving copyright law and intellectual property ownership-flavored headaches that get in the way. And even though GOG has a team working on its preservation program full time, senior bizdev manager Marcin Paczynski said they found the process of digital necromancy “harder than we thought it would be,” on a recent episode of The Game Business Show.
He added that the strange stories involved were enough to fill a book, and served up some examples that make me really want to read that book. One tidbit involved someone in the UK who had unwittingly inherited rights to several games, but was “nowhere to be found.”
Paczynski told The Game Business: “He kind of fell off the grid, so we hired a guy in the UK that was supposed to find him. That was the type of person who was really, really living without any cell phone, without any online presence, just chilling. He didn’t even know that he owned the rights because this was just a package with his inheritance … we have a lot of stories like that.”
