Classic SSI RPG rereleases by Forthright Entertainment

[DaveO]

I am basing this off of looking at the gaming company I am working with for release of a novella I will be publishing soon. They have the rights to Phantasie, Questron, and Wizard's Crown/Eternal Dagger. Why would they go through the trouble to get the rights? My best guess is that the company intends to rerelease those games on mobile devices(this would take the least effort) or possibly remaster for other platforms.

 

[LESS T_T]

I see a company called Forthright Entertainment has filed trademarks of those games and SSI May last year. https://uspto.report/company/Forthright-Entertainment-Inc

It seems the company is consist of guys who has been in the industry since 90s. https://www.forthrightentertainment.com/fe/team/

 

[TwoEdge]

Scott Bayless was a programmer on Pool of Radiance, Azure Bonds, and Champions of Krynn but ended up migrating to the production/business side of things. The others do not seem to be linked as directly, although they are old-schoolers, being involved in titles such as Starflight and The Immortal. Maybe there's something interesting stirring there, we'll see.

 

[DaveO]

They also copyrighted SSI. And the company focuses on mobile and other games.

 

[DaveO]

This begs the question...
With all the old abandoned games out there from the 8 bit era, could other companies be trying to do something similar?
My brother mentioned years ago about releasing the older games on mobile, and I don't see much that would prevent this. The difficulty would be to decide which ones to re-release. There are quite a few that come to mind to me, but this is at best guesswork.

 

[LESS T_T]

has filed trademarks of those games and SSI May last year

Oh right, this coincides with this.

On Twitter, Matt revealed that he actually owns the rights to Phantasie and Star Command but has no idea about GOG. Hopefully this interview will lead to the rerelease of these increasingly forgotten classics.

Back in 2013 he began working on a Phantasie V but soon realized that it was too much work. If he were to revisit Phantasie today, he would probably remake the original game with the mechanics of Phantasie III & IV and release it on Android platforms.

Trademarks were filed a week after that he said he submitted some docs to GOG.

I thought this would more likely be just simple DOSBox re-release but that would not take more than a year, right?

 

[Rahdulan]

Makes me wonder if they're setting up something like The Bard's Tale remastered trilogy in terms of production. I'm not sure how well that would work with SSI games' visuals, though.

 

[Chippy]

Remasters are nice. Remake into something like the TOEE engine would be most fappable.

 

[Fedora Master]

Do you really want your favorite games to get the attention of the currentyear crowd?

 

[DaveO]

Now about those possible candidates just as additional speculation. I realize at the moment, nobody has the rights to some of the games I am about to mention.

I do see the old Lode Runner, Miner 2049er, Jumpman as ones off the bat. Now if they were super aggressive, I could see Crush Crumble and Chomp being updated along with the old Orion games by Epyx. Threshold deserves a remaster, and it would be a good challenge for today's gamers. Even the Crystalware catalog like Fantasyland 2041 could be redone.

Boulder Dash was redone, so with a pool of available and easily added levels Jumpman and Lode Runner could have hundreds of levels to clear.

 

[LESS T_T]

I see a company called Forthright Entertainment has filed trademarks of those games and SSI May last year. https://uspto.report/company/Forthright-Entertainment-Inc

It seems the company is consist of guys who has been in the industry since 90s. https://www.forthrightentertainment.com/fe/team/

Well, I should have noticed that these trademarks are abandoned as of the time we found them out because they didn't submit docs stating their actual use cases.

(Also funny, the parent of Middle-earth Enterprises opposed the trademark of Sword of Aragon.)

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

I see a company called Forthright Entertainment has filed trademarks of those games and SSI May last year. https://uspto.report/company/Forthright-Entertainment-Inc

It seems the company is consist of guys who has been in the industry since 90s. https://www.forthrightentertainment.com/fe/team/

Well, I should have noticed that these trademarks are abandoned as of the time we found them out because they didn't submit docs stating their actual use cases.

(Also funny, the parent of Middle-earth Enterprises opposed the trademark of Sword of Aragon.)

So, there won't be Microprose style revival of SSI happening?

 

[Bester]

I see a company called Forthright Entertainment has filed trademarks of those games and SSI May last year. https://uspto.report/company/Forthright-Entertainment-Inc

It seems the company is consist of guys who has been in the industry since 90s. https://www.forthrightentertainment.com/fe/team/

Well, I should have noticed that these trademarks are abandoned as of the time we found them out because they didn't submit docs stating their actual use cases.

(Also funny, the parent of Middle-earth Enterprises opposed the trademark of Sword of Aragon.)

I didn't understand what you just said. Those trademarks were never active, because they didn't file them correctly? Explain pls.

Their status says "active".

 

[LESS T_T]

I didn't understand what you just said. Those trademarks were never active, because they didn't file them correctly? Explain pls.

Their status says "active".

Oh yeah, I should have linked the official listings. The original link I posted is not the official trademark office website and the listings are not up to date.

This is from the official DB you can look up here (search Forthright Entertainment in owner name field): https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=login&p_lang=english&p_d=trmk

And a page for Phantasie for example: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=88913023&caseType=SERIAL_NO&searchType=statusSearch

You can see Prosecution History for what happened to this trademark. They didn't submit docs that prove they are actually using these trademarks and are not some trademark trolls. (IIRC simple thing like coming soon teaser page would have been enough at this stage but IANAL.) They just didn't bother for some reason, so the office closed the applications.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

time for codex to buy the trademark for SSI games

 

[JamesDixon]

This begs the question...
With all the old abandoned games out there from the 8 bit era, could other companies be trying to do something similar?
My brother mentioned years ago about releasing the older games on mobile, and I don't see much that would prevent this. The difficulty would be to decide which ones to re-release. There are quite a few that come to mind to me, but this is at best guesswork.

You might as well forget about a faithful remaster of the AD&D SSI games because Hasbro wants to push Not D&D 5E. If there is a remaster then it will be using those rules. Hasbro let the trademarks lapse for AD&D.

 

[Ol' Willy]

I wonder who owns Panzer General trademark. This is a huge name

 

[unseeingeye]

You might as well forget about a faithful remaster of the AD&D SSI games because Hasbro wants to push Not D&D 5E. If there is a remaster then it will be using those rules. Hasbro let the trademarks lapse for AD&D.

This is what I thought when I saw the title of the thread. There is just no way it would happen when they are retroactively dissociating themselves from or rewriting earlier edition materials.

 

[LESS T_T]

So yeah, Forthright rereleased three of these games on GOG.

https://af.gog.com/game/questron_ii?as=1649904300
https://af.gog.com/game/sword_of_aragon?as=1649904300
https://af.gog.com/game/wizards_crown?as=1649904300

Probably just wrapped in DoxBox.

 

[Infinitron]

Nice! Quite a while since we had a newspost about a GOG retro release.

 

[unseeingeye]

I just saw this as well. I had been anticipating something of the sort by the day, as I know several others here have as well since these games began to disappear from most of the abandonware sites. Wizard's Crown is one I had just been getting into.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Looks half-arsed as usual. Wizcrown didn't even show a manual. Well, I've had the DOS copies for a while and DOSBOX WORKS JUST FINE!

I doubt they release the war games.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I like how they all say they require 1GB of drive space.

wat

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

That's a HUGE FUCK NO TO BUY THEN! It is bad enough the $6-7 price tag. Yeesh!

 

[Comte]

Man I want a rerelease of Age of Rifles who owns that ip?