'No One Lives Forever' Turns 25 and You Still Can't Buy It Legitimately

Summary

‘No One Lives Forever’ Turns 25 & You Still Can’t Buy It Legitimately from the abandonware dept One of my favorite things in all of professional sports is the unofficial holiday referred to as “Bobby Bonilla Day.” The short version of it is that Bonilla played for the New York Mets decades ago and eventually bought out his contract in 2000 when they decided they were done with him. Rather than pay the $5.9 million buyout of the contract up front, the team instead made the bonkers decision to negotiate a deferred payment schedule for that amount with 8% interest over the course of 25 years. The result is that the Mets will be paying Bonilla $1.2 million per year every July 1st, starting in 2011 and ending in 2035. And if you can’t make sense of the math on that one, it’s because you aren’t aware that the Mets ownership was one of Bernie Madoff’s many victims, which is why they had to defer the payments. November 10th is not Bobby Bonilla Day. But it should be named “Let Us Play No One Lives Forever, You Assholes Day.” The classic spy-shooter turned 25 on that date and, for the exact same reasons we’ve detailed for a god damned decade now, you still can’t buy the game. Here’s the short of it. Due to a series of mergers, closures, and rights purchases, the IP rights for No One Lives Forever and its sequel have been potentially split into three pieces between Warner Bros., Activision, and 20th Century Fox, like it was some kind of fucking horcrux. I say potentially because nobody really knows who owns what, if anything, when it comes to these games. When one company, Nightdive Studios, attempted to remaster and re-release the game as they’ve done with other titles, along with securing trademark rights to the game which hasn’t been sold in over a decade, all three companies complained that they may have rights to it and may sue over it. All of those qualifiers are, again, because even these companies themselves don’t know what rights they actually have. And why is that? ...