<
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/11/13/no-one-lives-forever-turns-25-you-still-cant-buy-it-legitimately/>
"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? Well, because the
gaming rights deals were inked before digital storage was widely used for this
sort of thing and, well, nobody seems to be able to locate the actual paperwork
denoting who owns what. Here’s an example of an exchange Nightdive had with
Activision.
“So we went back to Activision and, [after] numerous correspondence going
back and forth, they replied that they thought they might have some rights,
but that any records predated digital storage. So we’re talking about a
contract in a box someplace.” Kuperman laughed. “The image I get is the end
of Indiana Jones… somewhere in a box, maybe in the bowels of Activision,
maybe it was shipped off to Iron Mountain or somewhere. And they confessed,
they didn’t have [their] hands on it. And they weren’t sure that they even
had any of those rights.”
Which didn’t keep Activision from warning Nightdive that it might totally sue
if it moved forward with remastering the game. The other companies made similar
noises.
So what’s a person to do if they want to play this game? You can’t buy it
legitimately currently. It’s not even for sale anywhere. And a situation like
that, which I’ve stated before, completely breaks the copyright bargain. The
only option is, as
Kotaku of all places notes, to download it for free from
somewhere."
I bought and enjoyed
No One Lives Forever when it first came out 25 years ago
and still have an optical drive on my workstation, so I can reinstall my copy
from CD. I’d love to be able to play the sequel though.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
