[BFG9000]

I know it's old news that the megaton edition is no longer available, but i've recently gotten back into playing duke (world tour) and remembering how much I loved this game back in the day. I never got around to playing either duke it out in DC, or life's a beach sadly. I had hoped that maybe they would be released as dlc for world tour but that doesn't seem likely. Is there no way to get these anymore, other than maybe ebay?

[Ninety-Six]

Legally, as far as I know, no. All the companies involved went out of business forever ago so if you want to buy them you can only scour eBay or other secondhand sites.

[Forge]

Yet, if you look in the world tour workshop on steam somebody has posted up 'wt' versions of the D.C. maps. They might not look exactly like the originals because of the lighting and textures, but with some effort a person could download them all, get the d.c. art files, and package them into an episode.

Whatever obscure legal loophole Randy found, just so he'd have an excuse to take down megaton & remove competition to WT, was an asinine move. Now everyone suffers.

[gemeaux333]

It is fair it was considered illegal if not a single cent went to the rightfull owners of the rights for the expansions.

[MusicallyInspired]

IF.

[Forge]

They all became abandon-ware after they went out of print and the creating companies went defunct. There's nobody to send the money to unless atari re-opens their wizardworks division and starts selling them again.
Then buying them wouldn't be an issue.

[gemeaux333]

There's always a copyright owner for a license, licenses doesn't just fall into oblivion !

[Forge]

gemeaux333, on 16 June 2018 - 05:43 AM, said:

There's always a copyright owner for a license, licenses doesn't just fall into oblivion !

Wrong.
Companies cease to exist.
Publishing rights are held and maintained, but are only valid while the item is still in print or being actively produced / made by the publisher.
If they are no longer being printed, then the rights fall back on to the creating entity.
If that creating entity no longer exists, then it falls into abandon land.

- if the item is continuously made / printed - the publisher holds the rights for 95-120 years after the first date it was made. (or the lifetime of the creator +70 years for single / individual authors)
- if the item ceases to be printed, ownership falls back onto the creator
- but -
the publisher has the option to put something back in print, unless there's a stipulation in the contract stating otherwise (Randy loophole)
if they let something stay out of print for 95 years & there is no owner / creator, then the item becomes public domain.


Thank you for your opinion though.

[Fox]

The add-ons are in copyright limbo, it's likely 3DRealms never had the rights to release them in the first place. It's unlikely that their legal situation can be cleared, and surely not worth the investment as Randy pointed out on Twitter.

Who owns what depends on what was in the contracts. Unless someone has access to them, we don't know who held the rights back then and who would hold it now today. However I advise that it's probably not a single entity: there may be a dozen of individuals with a royalty share, the publisher could own part of the assets, etc.

[Forge]

Atari should hire Charlie Wiederhold and call him their wizardsworks division. Let him publish the expansions and collect 10% of the sales profits as pay.

[Jimmy]

Just pirate it. I don't give a fuck what anyone thinks of this post.

[MrFlibble]

Fox, on 17 June 2018 - 03:15 AM, said:

The add-ons are in copyright limbo, it's likely 3DRealms never had the rights to release them in the first place. It's unlikely that their legal situation can be cleared, and surely not worth the investment as Randy pointed out on Twitter.

I know that this is mostly wishful thinking, but how about... recreating the add-ons from scratch and simply distributing these mods? Probably not very realistic for Caribbean because there's so much modified art, but I think Duke It Out in D.C. could be done this way. IIRC there isn't so much new art, and I think similar props and textures could be created.

I mean, there are Doom community projects like the one where mappers recreated official levels from memory, or "in name only" projects where map design is inspired by the original map's title but not its content.

If anything, it could become a tribute to the original add-ons even the same cannot be widely available due to legal issues.

[Micky C]

People here are generally tied up in their own projects, and have neither the time nor motivation to attempt to recreate something that already exists.

There are more original and interesting ideas out there. Plus, the target audience of such a mod (people who haven’t played or don’t own after all this time, and yet would want to do so) Duke it out in DC is incredibly small.

[DustFalcon85]

Good thing that I'm holding on to those 3 expansion packs for dear life. Caribbean: Life's a Beach costs like $89 on Amazon. Yikes!

[NightFright]

You can also just play Alien Armageddon now. Doesn't include Nuclear Winter, but that one was crap, anyway. Maps have also been polished and should have a better "flow" to some degree.

[----]

NightFright, on 16 February 2019 - 08:21 AM, said:

You can also just play Alien Armageddon now. Doesn't include Nuclear Winter, but that one was crap, anyway. Maps have also been polished and should have a better "flow" to some degree.

@OP:
The quote is true and the mod available here:
https://www.moddb.co...eddon/downloads

Easy to install: Just unpack the folder and put the grp file into it.

[NNC]

It's amazing how people are concerned about copyrights of an abandonware product. Tom Mustaine did the exact right thing when he uploaded Doom's Perdition Gate on his website. People involved with Caribbean and DC should do the same thing. As for Nuclear Winter, it was a product that should have been pirated even at release date.

[Master O]

DustFalcon85, on 12 February 2019 - 07:55 AM, said:

Good thing that I'm holding on to those 3 expansion packs for dear life. Caribbean: Life's a Beach costs like $89 on Amazon. Yikes!

Have you made backups of them?

[DustFalcon85]

Master O, on 21 February 2019 - 09:25 AM, said:

Have you made backups of them?

Yes. I've made .iso's out of them and put them in my USB thumb drives, my external USB HDD and my Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage. Not to mention copying each disc as backup.

[Avoozl]

DustFalcon85, on 12 February 2019 - 07:55 AM, said:

Good thing that I'm holding on to those 3 expansion packs for dear life. Caribbean: Life's a Beach costs like $89 on Amazon. Yikes!

While I love CLaB more than the main game I sure wouldn't pay that much for it.

[MrFlibble]

Nancsi, on 19 February 2019 - 11:59 PM, said:

It's amazing how people are concerned about copyrights of an abandonware product. Tom Mustaine did the exact right thing when he uploaded Doom's Perdition Gate on his website.

And yet IIRC this was not supported by the Doomworld community.

Also, there's no such thing as abandonware, legally.

[Ninety-Six]

Legally no. But only because the law hasn't been adjusted for it. And it damn well should be.

[Danukem]

Ninety-Six, on 02 March 2019 - 01:53 AM, said:

And it damn well should be.

Even though I take advantage of "abandonware" myself, I don't think it's necessarily a good idea to codify it as a legal category.

If the copyright holder wants to emerge and assert their claim, why shouldn't they be allowed to? I can think of cases where that would be reasonable. Let's say you had made and published a game in your 20's, but then you went to law school and became a lawyer. You had a successful career for a while, but then shit happened, you got disbarred and you are broke. You notice that your game is a cult classic and people are distributing it as abandonware. You become interested in reviving it and making a special edition. You did make the game, it is your IP, and it is now your potential livelihood. So, naturally, the first thing you do is assert your copyright and try to take control of distribution. This seems reasonable. Maybe you didn't even know that the game was still popular until you became broke.

When I say that something is "abandonware", I'm not making any legal claim. I'm placing a bet. I'm betting that I will get away with distributing it. It's like saying that an intersection is a "free for all". By saying that, I'm not literally saying that jaywalking in that intersection is legal. I'm saying that I will be able to get away with it.

[Ninety-Six]

I disagree. Considering how extremely rare it is for an abandoned product to be resurrected, especially when it's being sat on by a bank or in copyright limbo, I think the benefits of having a determined lifespan on a single specific product (separate from IP) would far outweigh the consequences, as long as no money is made from it.


the alternative is what we have now: dead games that nobody is making money off of and in 95% of all cases, nobody ever will. Holding out for that last 5% (or less) is absurd.

[Sledgehammer]

Trooper Dan, on 02 March 2019 - 02:13 AM, said:

shit happened, you got disbarred and you are broke. You notice that your game is a cult classic and people are distributing it as abandonware. You become interested in reviving it and making a special edition.

How many people are out there who also wouldn't take their IPs a hostage or take an advantage of the fans (assuming of course they even bother to release a better version of their older software)? This is pretty idealistic, especially if we speak of lawyers and especially the ones who aren't familiar with the market.

Spoiler

No offense Yatta

Making abandonware legal is kind of bullshit though, copyright laws itself need to change (because those laws are fucking ridiculous, thanks Disney), the main problem are companies who take various IP a hostage and tend to exploit laws, making abandonware legal wouldn't do much. If anything, I bet a huge portion of companies will just get up from their lazy asses and... try to protect their property much more aggressively without doing anything productive (read as no improved or new good games). But yeah, I doubt that will happen unless some major miracle going to happen.

[Zaxx]

Ninety-Six, on 02 March 2019 - 01:53 AM, said:

Legally no. But only because the law hasn't been adjusted for it. And it damn well should be.

That's interesting actually. Sure, abandonware simply doesn't exist as a legal term but when it comes to legal practice you just have to admit that it exists even in the land of the law.

Example: here, download the whole No One Lives Forever series:
http://nolfrevival.tk/
Why can you do this? Because the legal situation of NOLF is so fucked up that it's not even clear who owns it = there is no entity in the world that could excercise its rights for the intellectual property. There is nobody to protect the copyright, what is that if not abandonware?

It's also pretty common for very old games that there is a person or a company who could act but they just don't care. For example Jordan Mechner owns the Prince of Persia IP, Ubisoft is licensing it from him (or not, it's dormant for a while now so maybe Mechner is the only one involved again) yet the original 1989 Prince of Persia and its sequel is available for free on a lot of abandonware sites. Those games are so old that they are incapable of making money these days so nobody gives a shit about them when it comes to protecting the IP.

So you know, if there is nobody who can or is willing to take legal action then that's abandonware, the law just doesn't have a name for that specific situation. In theory it is illegal but if you want to protect your rights you have to act on them, if that can't happen then the IP can and will be treated like if it was public domain because of that missing link.

[Sledgehammer]

I think whoever holds it doesn't give a fuck anyway or may as well be unaware of this website existence which tend to happen frequently. Though I'm pretty sure that THQ Nordic or NDS got their hands on NOLF or at least there were some movements with it.

[Zaxx]

They are not unaware of the site, it was covered by some pretty high profile news outlets like RockPaperShotgun:
https://www.rockpape...ts-download-it/
As for NOLF itself yes, GOG stated that there is something going on these days but until that's not settled practically there is nobody who can act as the IP owner. The 90s and the early 2000s was messy when it comes to videogame IPs.

Edit: And really the thing is that since the games are not sold commercially anymore a breach in copyright can't lead to financial harm which is mostly what those cases are all about.

[Jimmy]

Just pirate the expansions, seriously.

[NNC]

MrFlibble, on 02 March 2019 - 12:52 AM, said:

And yet IIRC this was not supported by the Doomworld community.

Also, there's no such thing as abandonware, legally.

Doomworld is such a weird place. I got my first warning points there because I just asked about a compilation release if it was legit.