Where are the rights to retro games?

[HeavyMetalMe]

I don't know if anyone has talked about this before, but where exactly are the rights to all these old retro games? How about games that were released cross platformed? (on both SNES and Genesis, etc etc.). Do these companies hold tight to these rights, or what?

I'm asking all this because I'm interested in doing some business and would like to go about things properly and I'm wondering who to talk to. I haven't a clue where to start... Any help would be appreciated.

[dsheinem]

most companies retain the rights to their games - or the rights go to others that buy them (e.g. EA buying Midway's NBA Jam franchise). I guess it's hard to give you an answer unless you could be more specific...

[dedalusdedalus]

Video games, like any other work that requires an entire team of people to make creative contributions, are a "work for hire," so the copyright belongs to whatever company employed these people to make the video game. The rights don't belong to the individual programmers, designers, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire

The term for a "Work for Hire" is 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, so even if they ARE retro, you've still got to wait a long time before they fall into the public domain.

[HeavyMetalMe]

Solved my own problem- the game I was looking at is owned by Konami, and sure enough, in their contact section there's an e-mail address for business opportunities and licensing. Wonderful.

[vlame]

what were u gonna do?

[Hatta]

Good luck. Original owners are generally either extremely protective of their intellectual properties, or they moved on so long ago that it's not even worth their time to give you permission to use them. It's rare when you find a developer who's sympathetic to reuse of their properties, but when it happens it's great.

[HeavyMetalMe]

Good luck. Original owners are generally either extremely protective of their intellectual properties, or they moved on so long ago that it's not even worth their time to give you permission to use them. It's rare when you find a developer who's sympathetic to reuse of their properties, but when it happens it's great.

Yeah, I'm pretty much anticipating the worst but we'll see.

what were u gonna do?

It's a secret!!!

[Betamax001]

I can't wait to see what it is!

[REPO Man]

What if the original company doesn't exist, and went out of business before making the game public domain or giving the rights to another company? Case in point: MUGEN.

[HeavyMetalMe]

While doing a little research, I came across this Nintendo page which I had never knew existed, but I found it very interesting. I'm not on either side of the Emulator/ROM discussion, but it's interesting to see that Nintendo is interested as well...

http://ap.nintendo.com/faq/#oop_not_pd