maltzauctions.com — Alias, Bust a Move, Crazy Taxi, Double Dragon, and hundreds of others. All these games once belonged to Acclaim software, but since they had a little bankruptcy problem, they are deciding to auction off the publishing rights to all of their games. Want the right to publish and sell Smash T.V.? It can be yours for the small price of $5,000.
Dec 5, 2005 View in Crawl 4
laurentlasalleDec 6, 2005
A publishing right allows you to publish a product anytime you want, in some form (or any form), and cash in everytime (I suspect the author of the product gets 50% or something).
jesusphreakDec 6, 2005
So if someone was to purchase the rights to say Mortal Combat...Do you get the source code and all the game assets or anything like that?
modsuperstarDec 6, 2005
I honestly think that Nintendo should swoop in and buy up alot of these licenses. They plan to have ultimate backward compatibility for the Revolution, so having older acclaim titles(ie. Double Dragon) would make perfect sense for them. I know that is one hangup with their concept, in that they have no way of releasing other publishers older content, so this would give them a leg up for sure.
keithmcbrideDec 6, 2005
Acclaim had the rights to distribute a lot of console ports in the 90s. NBA Jam for example was not their game, they just did the marketing and distribution because Midway didnt want to do it itself. Pretty much any game you say "was awesome" is probably not something Acclaim made in-house.
dwhite601Dec 6, 2005
I am interested in getting my favorite game from this auction and am continuing to research this. If anyone's also serious, I suggest they read an excellent response I got to a post on www.gamedev.net<a class="user" href="http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=353525">http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=353525</a>
vlsi0nDec 7, 2005
i liked acclaim :(
lynxproDec 7, 2005
So, if online readers pitched in the money, they could acquire the rights so that they could choose who could legally use ROMs for those games in various emulators (MAME). That might be a way to stay ahead of the Software Publishers Association. Wonder why they haven't jumped in to prevent end users from issuing emulation rights under such a scheme.Hmm...I don't think you could publish the source code under the GPL. Maybe a modified license that still recognized the trademarks and copyrights of the actual property while still giving you the right to use the software for free, and modify it as long as there was no commercial profiteering.
eyotDec 7, 2005
I bet a company already boguht them out