How do two companies own the rights to Blood?
Gory ’90s shooter is owned by both Warner Bros. and Atari
Earlier this week,
Atari announced plans to release a new version of ‘90s shooter Blood. Some industry-watchers have made the germane point that Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment owns the rights to
Blood, not Atari. So what’s the deal?
It looks like Warner Bros. owns the intellectual property rights to any new games based on the Blood franchise. The company has not announced any plans to create a Blood game. Polygon contacted a representative of the company to ask about the franchise’s status, but did not receive a reply.
Atari, however, owns the digital distribution rights for the original game, which came out in 1997. The terms of its ownership includes limited provisions for updating the game.
Atari chief operating officer Todd Shallbetter emailed Polygon with the following statement: “We are not changing the game. We have distribution rights and this version is just being updated and optimized for modern operating systems and hardware.”
These limitations are the basis for developer Nightdive Studios’ work on the re-release.
Bloodis best remembered as one of the more successful games released under 3D Realms’ Build engine, which came to prominence in 1996 with the release of
Duke Nukem 3D.
Blood is a gory game that makes extensive use of occult, horror imagery.
The game was originally developed by Monolith Productions and published by GT Interactive, which owned the publishing rights to the game. GT was subsequently acquired by French company Infogrames. Later, Infogrames rebranded as Atari. Monolith, which retained ownership of
Blood’s IP, was acquired by Warner Bros. Interactive in 2004. It is best known for
Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and its sequel,
Middle-earth: Shadow of War.
Although unrelated to the specific issue of
Blood, Atari and Warner have a long and storied history. Warner bought the original console company, Atari Inc. from founder Nolan Bushnell in 1976. The company presided over the notorious 1983 crash of the console market. Atari was split between a home computer company called Atari Corp., best known for the Atari ST, and a smaller console / coin-op concern called Atari Games. That company was bought by Time Warner in 1993, but later sold to Midway, which later sold all its assets to ... Warner Bros. Entertainment.
Developer Nightdive is best known for updating games from the 1990s, such as
Forsaken: Remastered and
Turok. It is currently working on a
crowdfunded reboot of the originalSystem Shock. The company recently posted
an update that System Shock has “entered full production.” That game is due to be released early in 2020. No release date has been given for
Blood.