by Aside from how strange it is to see an age-restricted video on Nintendo (even the Emio trailers weren’t restricted), the copyright on these games is… confusing, to say the least. As a license, Shadow Man is indeed still controlled by Valiant’s corpse so that makes sense; but Turok is Penguin Random House? I thought it had ended up under Comcast’s control.
But the real question mark is why they both call themselves ‘Night Dive Studios’. The ending of each legal version makes it clear that this is indeed referring to Nightdive Studios, which make up half of Atari’s current developer resources. Now Wade Rosen made a big show of buying “most” of Accolade, but when he finally (finally) released a full asset count of Atari’s current IP log in August, only 11 of the roughly 90 IP Accolade are audited mentioned at his demise. such as property of the current iteration. Although several Intellivision IP are counted multiple times, and Microscope is somehow one of the larger sections despite being the only halfway point that still closes (despite everything).
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1e-tl9Oqwnr78879Lnne_uhlsGkPWFK_z428ZmUaJjog/edit?usp=sharing
Now notice that Nightdive has its own section, along with Digital Eclipse (and ignore the Intellivision duplicates and the random appearance of Other Ocean’s IDARB), and yet it only lists 5 IP addresses specifically for them. One of these is the System Shock series, co-owned by Tencent, and none of them mention partial ownership of Accolade’s licensed games.
THQNordic inherited the code rights to all licensed games from the original THQ; this is how Rehydrated can exist, but THQ was a much cleaner mass party. Accolade has been distributed and resold so many times that it is an abused and mutilated Frankenstein. Even more than Atari itself, which is in 3 known quantities: Atari 7, Warner Bros Discovery and Songbird. Accolade is still missing pieces in Canada and parts of China.
All this is to say: the NoA Licensing Legal Department knows the secrets of the universe that keep me awake at night. Screaming
