'No One Lives Forever' turns 25 and you still can't buy it legitimately
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There's also a community-driven project [3] keeping it playable on modern hardware - however, it hasn't seen any activity in several years.
If you haven't played or heard of NOLF before, I highly encourage checking it out. It's a fantastic title, even after all these years.
0: https://web.archive.org/web/20020217233624/http://pc.ign.com...
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20010720053220/http://noonelives...
Seriously though, break a law that no one is interested in enforcing? What are we doing here, exactly, carrying water for a handful of companies that had nothing to do with the original development of the game in the first place?
ETA: This aside from the fact that you can buy a used copy and play it...
Used copies won't be around forever, it would be better to have a proper community version.
It may not bother you, but there are many people who would prefer it if they didn't have to break the law to play the game. Used copies won't be around forever, at which point those people will be SOL.
What we're doing here is complaining about the bad law. And complaining about these companies, but it's bad they even have the ability to cause this deadlock.
I wouldn't put it past any one of the companies who think they might maybe have some rights to the game to sic their hired copyright goons on gamers who aren't too careful about how they go about pirating the game, their ISPs, and anyone else they think they can threaten into a settlement offer for a few bucks.
The copyright enforcement regime has no morals and they're happy to make it your problem to prove in court that they don't actually have the rights the material they claim was infringed. When a bunch of record labels sued Cox for a $1 billion in damages Cox eventually found that the labels never had the rights to many of the songs they were successfully sued for.
They were willing to threaten Nightdive. I certainly wouldn't call them disinterested in enforcing the copyrights they may or may not have.
It's like GZDoom, you have to supply your own copy of DOOM.WAD
Even if you don't want to pirate it, there are lots of copies for multiple platforms available to buy just on eBay. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> Even if you don't want to pirate it, there are lots of copies for multiple platforms available to buy just on eBay.
This feels like a contradictory position.
On the one hand the important thing is the preservation and availability of a work. On the other hand it's okay if the it is only available as 20+ year old used copies and pirated copies.
And any preservation or restoration project is under the shadow of 3 companies (Warner Bros., Activision, and 20th Century Fox) which have all recently "complained that they may have rights to [NOLF] and may sue over it"
“We made it, you’ve enjoyed it and now fuck off”
No, it’s not. Warner, Activision and 20th Century can collectively suck my balls and lick deez nuts. Literally no one benefits from this.
Not true [1]. It’s available on a bunch of platforms!
Exactly like you do if you want to play the original Doom with modern source ports. Since the game is not available to buy, this means either pulling those assets from an original retail copy, or pirating them.
They are clearly stating that Doom is also not available to buy, which is not true.
Get a daily build.
Playing for instance, Strain and such with FreeDoom.wad as the main IWADs yields the same experience. Ditto with Back To Saturn X.
Fixing bugs and stuff is nice, but a lot of the fun speedrunning tech we depend on was also fixed, and they were kind enough to create a separate "lithfix" that only made the games playable on modern systems and left the in-game bugs intact. Not only that, but they also added a dev console and fixed some of the old cheat codes, which made it so that we could finally noclip around to inspect the maps properly and toggle on hitboxes, etc.
It's incredible the impact a single individual can have. They never asked for anything back, and now their work is even included by default on the "unofficial" download page. Even though I don't speedrun anymore (maybe one day!) I'll always be grateful for that :)
The game holds up incredibly well - beautiful scenery, fun story, some of the best and most humorous dialogue in any game ever[2], and a really strong and well-written female main character. Would strongly recommend anyone to pick it up, just know that some parts struggle a bit with the "stealth", and expect (and embrace) "going loud" at times. But do try to stealth a lot, as you're nicely rewarded with brilliant dialogue! NOLF2 is fun too, but very different - definitely worth a play through though!
They're also very fun speedrun games, and the community is very helpful to anyone, even if you're just wanting to play it casually :)
Edit: Forgot to mention that they also fixed the multiplayer in NOLF2, and some people still play sometimes! More info on this page[3]
[0]: https://www.speedrun.com/nolf <-- you'll find a link to the game here as well
[1]: https://haekb.itch.io/ <-- here you'll find all the lithtech stuff they made
[2]: https://youtu.be/q2PxxbJydBU <-- this is just one of many examples
If a company came up to me and said "We have interest in reviving an IP of yours. We will take on the development costs, we will take on all the risk, all you have to do is say yes and you will get a fixed percentage of every sale"--that seems like an easy win-win, does it not? The only reasons I would imagine you would say NO were if:
1) Concern that the company will do a crappy job and tarnish the brand's reputation (which, fair, but Nightreign studios and/or GOG seem to have a pretty solid track record on this)
2) Your company's bean-counters are both so greedy and risk-averse such that their thinking is, "We only wish to allow something if it will be a guaranteed hit...but if it is a guaranteed hit, we want to do it internally so that we get to keep all of the profits!" In which case, the requirements are almost impossible to satisfy, since there is inevitably some level of risk undertaken during the remaster/re-release effort.
In other words, they believe that they may be able to do more than you with it, if they ever get around to it.
If your potential market is tiny--and lets be honest, the market for an unpirated version of this is quite small,most people sufficiently interested have pirated it already--then keeping it out of the public in favor of some unknown potential later is a consideration.
Namely back in 1992, having the rights to Infocom's catalogue, which earlier had been put up for grabs for 25k, literally saved a then bankrupt Activision (!) when they rereleased it as a compilation of The Lost Treasures of Infocom, for millions of revenue in total. [1]
In addition to the problems and cost of establishing ownership that other people mentioned, I suppose this story was one hell of a lesson for any publisher not to forfeit any rights you may or may not be holding.
But also, I kind of think it becomes a thing where it's too small potatoes for anybody senior enough to actually approve all of the legal stuff to care enough to make happen. Sure, it's basically free money, but it's not a lot of free money.
- Fox Interactive was eventually sold to Vivendi, but most of their library was listed as owned by 20th Century Fox, which has since been acquired by Disney
- the second and third games in the series were published by Sierra, who over the years have been owned by Comp-U-Card, Vivendi, Activision, and eventually Microsoft
- Monolith Productions were eventually purchased by Warner Bros., who shut the studio down earlier this year
Just from that list, there's a huge list of media conglomerates that could have an ownership claim: News Corp, Disney, Vivendi, Warner Bros., Microsoft
I've actually been the "business decision maker" in some similar multi-law firm licensing confusion. It was a situation where my company had no significant financial stake in the outcome and was just trying to be the 'good guy'. In fact, all the big companies were aligned on being willing to just help out the small company trying to get the thing to happen. Despite that sincere intent all around, it was basically impossible to do what they needed without significant expense or even potentially creating new liability for ourselves where there was none. The moral being: don't just assume "we can't have a nice things because of big company assholes". That's sometimes the case but not always. There are execs out there who'd be happy to 'do the right thing' if they can. Over probably a dozen similar situations, there were only a couple were I was able to help a good thing happen - despite actively trying to find a way to make it work.
If the game studios were actually not being assholes, they could each say, "You know what, we're not making any money from whatever rights we might or might not have, so, lawyers: scram and go do something else. Here's a signed paper saying we give up all rights to the IP. Go have a ball."
But, they'll never do this because corporations are like Smaug, as another poster put it--they hoard for hoarding's sake and will never voluntarily give up value, even if it's a fractional share of potential value, and even if that value is not materially helping them. They'd rather destroy something they're not using than give it away.
Someone else in the thread mentioned “creating liability where we previously had none”. Let’s say all of the game studios in your scenario do what you’re proposing, but as it turns out none of them actually had the right to re-release the soundtrack because of a separate contract that some subset of them had with a music producer. That music producer didn’t even know the game had been re-released until it had been out for two years and it turns out he’s really pissed that he hasn’t been getting royalties…
I know corporations with Serious General Counsel don’t think this way but it’s kind of a shame we have evolved such an intense risk-aversion.
If you just went ahead and did the release, the stakeholders might well do the research on their own dime. Of course, those that do have rights might not be interested in negotiating a license at that point. And, there's a chance of getting access to a development archive if you're doing an authorized release.
However, it IS consistent with a thing prudent lawyers would typically do when discussing an unknown future hypothetical. They'd reserve their client's rights should the client later discover they have grounds and wish to pursue it. Depending on how it's phrased, that could be confused with a 'legal threat', but I suspect the lawyers may have just been careful to not unintentionally relinquish any future rights.
I'm basing this on being involved in similar licensing discussions between lawyers. While some lawyers and clients are assholes, not all are. Even if they were trying to be 'good guys', it's not clear they could be in this situation. Since they don't even know if they have any rights, they don't have grounds to grant any kind of permission (and doing so in the absence of having any rights could make their client liable - at least in theory).
These things typically only work when you are well connected to senior management in these orgs, the ones who can sign off on such one-off requirements. Business processes are designed for the 80% of use-cases. More often than not, we end up hitting a wall with any long tail/unique requests.
Also, the developer/publisher/distributor/etc may have had revenue sharing agreements with various parties. Those need to be found and understood too. Sometimes those are in % of gross income, % of net income, % of sales price, or a fixed amount per copy sold. If anything needs addressing, you've got to find those parties or their successors and negotiate. You should also find those parties anyway, to pay royalties they're due, but if you at least set up an escrow account, you'll be prepared when they find you.
I would hope games contracts are a bit more forward looking now, and try to address these things, but 25 years ago, you would still get old games at computer surplus stores... A handful of developers would put out old games collections, but most games never came back.
> you will get a fixed percentage of every sale"--that seems like an easy win-win, does it not?
It's really not an easy win-win. Entertainment falls into the attention economy, so if you're giving rights to some low-value IP away for pennies but it winds up getting popular, that's lost revenue elsewhere that might be more valuable.
On top of that these media corporations are borderline militant with defending their vaults of IP because it's the only way to distinguish themselves in a crowded landscape. Exclusivity is essentially the only way they can compete, and giving away rights for peanuts is not in their interest.
These companies default to saying "no" and when you add in the complexity of finding documents that may not exist, it's not hard to see why it'll never happen.
See, there's the difference. You, as a sole person, can easily decide giving permission or not. But they, as a group of employees, contain not a single one whose job description is "give away stuff". There isn't some keeper of the back catalogue who could confidently say "yeah, no problem". Who knows, perhaps some skunkwors division has just sunk a few million into reviving the IP. It all falls up towards the CEO and that level is rarely bothered with pittances like some inherited old license. And chances are even they would not dare, because ultimately they aren't the owner, their employer is and who knows what they would like to happen to the IP
It was an excellent game. The idea of a continuation of the series is appealing, but a lot of modern adaptations really stink, so maybe it's better off in the amber of nostalgia.
One that I grabbed for $10 was Adrenix, a 'Descent' clone that has very few mentions around and reviewed fairly averagely. I loved it!
As for modern adaptions of games, if they can do it either like 3D Realms retro style like with Ion Fury, or go into the full re-imagined space like they did with Doom 2016. But any middle ground seems to lead to disappointment.
I don't really miss the time of having to choose games this way. If you lucked out it was great, but you were also potentially putting down upwards of $50+ bucks in 1995 dollars on a game that you might end up really disliking.
Sometimes we buy something we don't like, but it's on us, and that's just life.
At some point I think we just took the "satisfied or your money back" mentality too far.
Edit: note this doesn't absolve actual scammers or other bad actors from being crappy people though.
I miss it too. I used to read computer game magazines as a kid. I recently re-evoked that feeling by subscribing to a linux magazine. Maybe there are still game magazines out there but i’m too lazy to look.
Obviously this would only apply to things that sold above a certain number of units, making it something of cultural relevance. We also don't want this law abused to steal things if someone gets a copy of your dropbox files and you can't afford a lawyer to respond to legal demands.
The answer to the question in the quote is: "It's not until someone wins a lawsuit."
The federal government recognizes, and will protect through legal enforcement, an exclusive right of the intellectual property holder to control its distribution.
Copyright infringement only occurs when a court rules that it has because that is the only mechanism through which intellectual property holders can claim a legal right. It is not a "natural right".
Streaming from a "piracy" site is effectively legal for the viewer because they are not infringing on any distribution or resell rights (but the hoster is). If Netflix is mistakenly giving access to all seasons of a show when it only paid for the latest one, how could anyone call the unknowing viewer who is watching Season 1 a pirate?
"Abandonware" pushes this idea even further: as long as there is no reasonable expectation of a successful infringement case being brought against anyone then distribution is also without consequence. Perhaps there is a statue of limitations that might definitive codify this or a "defend or lose it" stipulation as exists with trademarks.
Making a game is enough of an investment that you wouldn’t do it if you knew you had a high likelihood of being sued by legitimate rights holders as soon as you started making the news. Digging through paper records from decades ago is enough of an investment that you wouldn’t do it unless you had a reason to also.
Classic stalemate.
I think it might be better if the recipient of such vague threats were able to themselves initiate a court case to clarify the matter. The party making vague threats might be ordered by the court to either produce their evidence within six months or give up their claim by granting a public licence or whatever.
But it's hard to see all the consequences of rules like that and there are plenty of lobbyists able and willing to provide bad advice to legislators.
Personally, I am not a fan of "intellectual property" laws such as copyrights and patents as their original intention doesn't seem relevant anymore and instead they've become a tool of corporations to increase their profits (often at the expense of the creative people that actually produce the works). Copyright only works properly when the creative works get released into the public domain and that is not going to happen with NOLF (and a lot of computer games) and so the public are being denied their side of the copyright deal.
"It's not copyright infringement if it's never going to be released into the public domain in a usable form" would be a better statement of my thinking.
If nobody has the de facto rights, them there's nobody to steal it from.
The issue at hand is the absence of a legal owner. It should fall into a commons for public use until someone can prove ownership. Eg. abandonware.
The reason the viewer in your example is not liable though is because there is no reasonable expectation that viewers should (or even could) verify that Netflix held the rights to season 1. The license that the viewer has to access any media is between them and Netflix, not between them and each individual media rights-holding company.
Sorry for the tangent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Bonilla
On the other hand there are claims this allowed the Mets to free up cash flow in the short term and also allowed them a draft pick in the next season.
https://ftw.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2015/07/01/new-yor...
Good stuff.
Authors already have problems with getting their books back when out of print. Ebooks make it worse cause they can stay in print with low effort.
I like idea of copyright with short span, like 10 years, and then have to register and renew for every subsequent decade. That would give registry of owners who are serious about work. Would never see public domain movies, but there are lots of obscure works that would be public domain.
nothing stops that from happening even now, tho
Microsoft had the original development team, Nintendo had the software and Activision had the James Bond License. Microsoft was willing to develop it for both Xbox 360 and Wii but they simply couldn't get the rights between all three straightened out.
If those three, companies that are no strangers to handling legal issues cannot figure out, it doesn't look good for smaller titles like this.
I wonder if I should spend some time trying to get it running on my Steam Deck - there's a couple of Reddit threads around getting it to work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Operative:_No_One_Lives_Fo...
If the potential victory from a lawsuit is $20K and Activision estimates it will cost them $50K to find this piece of paper, is the company relatively safe from a lawsuit?
But the killer is that WB and Fox (now Disney) also are sitting out there as maybe rights-holders. Let's say that each of them also has a 1/3 chance of suing and that they are all independent. Now you have a 8/27th chance of not getting sued- less than 1/3. So the expected value has to be twice as large as with a normal, single company situation to justify the increased risk of lawsuit from one of three companies. And so no one pencils out the choice as a good one, compared to the opportunity cost of working on some other game with a clearer rights situation.
They've admitted the documents, if they're anywhere, are buried in a file cabinet at Iron Mountain. You can set a lower limit on the amount of labor required to produce the document. Activision is not going to go on this quest if the labor required * chance of the document existing exceeds the amount they can win in a lawsuit.
If you ignore the cease and desist their next step is to sue you in court where the lawyers fight it out. They can sue immediately, without a cease and desist at if they want. However the reason to do a cease and desist is it costs a lawyer just a few minutes to write one up, while court often costs millions of dollars - thus if you just stop doing something after the cheap letter it is typically best for them to ignore the what they could have got by taking you to court right away. They can bring a cease and desist to court and show that they gave you time to stop which looks good to the judge and can influence how much the judge awards if they win (if they lose the cease and desists is at best meaningless).
A default judgement is when they sue and nobody shows up in court. Because you don't defend yourself the courts just assume you are guilty (assuming the case isn't completely absurd). Sometimes you can get a default judgement when it is obvious someone is doing something bad but not who, and then if you later identify who you can collect immediately - but that person you accuse can fight the default judgement in a lot of ways.
Ignoring such letters will result in absolutely nothing. The trick is to know which is which, and that is why you ask an attorney.
If I'm a patent troll spraying and praying patent violation suits, I still at the end of the process still need to prove to own the patent I claim I do.
In this case, we know there is a lower cost to producing the document that Activision will not want to bear because the total they can recover is below just the cost of producing the document that proves standing. Why would I not just let it go into default judgement, knowing it's toothless?
Says you. But companies can be extreme maximalists when it comes to copyright, and burn money just to "hit 1 to 'educate' 100".
Shut up.
If that’s the best argument you have, then you’ve got nothing.
I, like most people, don’t come here to see AI slop opinions. We can get that approximately everywhere else. We don’t need HN to be filled with AI confabulations, and if it were to happen, we would leave.
It's all risk-adjusted cost/benefit, and there is almost no practical benefit to taking the risk. Yes, it would be nice to clear up the legal ownership rights and to have a non-pirated version available. But as an economic matter, there is almost no value.
(Fox, one of the possible rights holders, was acquired by Disney in 2019.)
I think proving that proving they had the rights at some time could be sufficient because it is impossible to prove they never sold them.
Yes, but see below.
> If Activision's version of this piece of paper was chewed up by rats in the 90s, does their ownership stake vanish in a puff as well?
No, but complex. Legally the contract is still valid, but they still need to show the court what the details are. All parties to a contracts get a copy, and so Activation can legally force other people who should have a copy of the contract to produce it, any copy is enough (or several partially rat eaten copies may be enough to reproduce what the original said). Activision has all the time they want to find copies of the contract (unlike trademark, copyright isn't use it or lose it), so you are risking the above for a long time. Sometimes enough testimony in court of we did have a contract is enough - when it is obvious there must have been a contract at one time the court will put together obvious details which might be enough to sue. In this case the 3 parties can agree that while they don't know who as rights between the 3 of them the rights must be contained and so they can agree to a 3-way split for purposes of going to court - even if it latter turns out only one party had rights, that party agreed to the split (though if you years latter can prove a 4th party has rights they can sue the other 3).
Of course if rats did eat all copies of the contract the lawyer fees to figure this out are likely more than the game is worth and so it probably isn't worthwhile to sue, so practically it may be as if they no longer have rights to the game just because they can't afford to enforce it. This is a very risky take though and so nobody should risk it.
People keep on insisting when it comes to these things that various things are risky in a rather handwavey way but they never fully come out and articulate the risks.
I asked this question to ChatGPT a bunch of ways and tried to understand what the specifics are when people say this is risky and I can't really seem to get to anything that is a nuclear level risk, just a garden variety risk that you need to manage amongst all the other garden variety risks involved in running a business (when inputted with a reasonable set of realistic assumptions, it's possible to create assumptions where this is a nuclear level risk but that doesn't seem to apply to the majority of real world cases, including this one).
Willful copyright infringement means liability for statutory damages, compensatory damages, claims on all profits, and legal fees (yours and theirs).
(I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, chatgpt is a very bad lawyer).
The worse case is if they have a registered copyright which means they get to charge triple damages. I'm not completely clear on what triple damages mean. I think that means they subtract your costs to publish the game and count only the profits, but I'm not sure. I'm also not sure if they assume your costs, or what they would have charged if they had done this (that is if you sell the game for $50 but they would charge $100) - you can bet their lawyers will argue for whatever gets them the most, and may also ask for lawyer fees.
For a small company the above will bankrupt you.
Source code and materials etc can remain trade secrets if desired?
And all IP with a movie as well - including characters. This would stop a studio from forever milking the same piece of IP forever.
Downside: Movies will be made to not last; Software will be made to be incompatible with everything on a 10-year timeframe; and the country who enabled this open mindset will displease its copyright owners who will move to the other countries.
More importantly: If no tax is paid, after a reasonable amount of time, (1-3 years,) the work is considered abandoned and automatically moved to the public domain.
Even more importantly, if the work isn't available for general consumption (rental and physical), at a reasonable cost, without a subscription / ads, no copyright claims can be perused for non-commercial piracy. (IE, it would become totally legal to torrent a TV show if it's stuck in a streaming service that requires ads / a subscription.)
Maybe there can be different rules for copyrights owned by humans vs corporations; 5 years free for corporations, 20 years free for humans. Or maybe longer for humans, I dunno. But having corporations sit on IP just because they can is ridiculous.
If you want to extend your copyright past 20 years, too bad. Come up with something new; that one's public domain now. Or it should be at any rate.
That being said: I think reforming copyright should allow fair use and incentives for curation. There's nothing wrong with the Beatles' heirs curating the Beatles recordings for streaming, and remastering them; as long as there's no prosecution for torrenting needle drops of old Beatles records, torrenting rips of old Beatles CDs from the 1990s, and making a streaming service of such recordings (the old ones, not the remasters) without needing permission of the heirs.
Just not exclusively.
Most copyrights are works for hire and owned by a corporation.
Your proposal would only work for unpublished works, and self-published works.
Personally, once I think a work is made available to the general public, it needs to enter the public domain, or enter a period of compulsory licensing, after a predetermined period of time. It doesn't matter if the copyright is owned by an individual or a corporation.
Usual insanely wordy paragraphs and endless linked text hiding everything on TechDirt.
But seriously, the way the copyright system prevents people from preserving and re-experiencing works as soon as the "rightful owner" stops caring about them is a travesty. I say that when an IP becomes orphaned, stops being claimed by a new rights-holder, or some time after it stops being sold/used, it should be forcibly removed from the grip of copyright and opened up for everyone to use. Otherwise, we're heading to a world where only a slim subset of well-performing properties are being offered, while the rest lie in a gigantic graveyard of things-someone-owns-but-will-never-use instead of being potentially put to use by someone who would actually care.
Any content, once published/distributed/broadcast in the US, that is not made readily available to the public going forward loses copyright protection. This includes revisions.
* A film, TV show, sound recording, book, or any other copyrighted content must, once made available for public purchase, always remain available. If the only streaming service willing to pay to stream your movie has the smallest market share, too bad; the market has spoken on the value of your content. An ebook can fulfill this purpose for a print book; streaming can fulfill this purpose for a theatrical or physical-media film. But it must be available to maintain copyright.
* Compulsory licensing should apply; if Netflix wants to pay the same amount of money as the above-mentioned small market-share streaming service for the film, Netflix must be allowed to do so. The film's rights owner can demand more, raising the price for all, but if every outlet refuses, the film immediately goes into public domain. This process is reversible, but it would set a ceiling to prevent the owner from setting a ridiculously high price to prevent its availability.
* If a Blu-ray of a film or TV show has excised or modified scenes for whatever reason, and the original isn't also made available (whether on a different "theatrical cut" release, or as a different cut on the same disc), the entire original version immediately goes into public domain.
* If NBC posts Saturday Night Live skits on YouTube that have removed "problematic" scenes[1] without explaining the differences—a diff file, basically—the entire original skit loses copyright protection.
Separate issue, but also very worthwhile:
* Streaming services must make all data regarding their content available in some standardized format. Consumers should be able to use one application to access all content they have access to. The creator of SmartTube (a very nice YouTube-compatible player) should be able to add the appropriate API support to search for and play Netflix/Prime Video/Disney+/Paramount+ content.
The above applies to software, too. Legalize abandonware!
[1] Something I understand already happens
I could definitely see starting over with a reboot, which would also give the studio involved a chance to dodge all the rights issues by doing a 'spiritual successor' and renaming everything. 25 years later you're likely trying to attract newcomers much more than you are fans of the old games that want specifically more NOLF. I'd also be interested in a cold war era spy thriller that played it straight, real spy history has a lot to pull from that could be weaved into an intriguing story to play through, and NOLF did touch on some of the issues around spying like taking advantage of people.
And if nobody manages to prove ownership, would the ip land in the public domain or with the asset-swapper? Because if it's the latter, that'd change the risk-reward ratio quite a bit.
Or if a work going out of "print" (or equivalent depending on thee medium) some limited number of years forfeits the copyright.
This common situation where a work is still protected by copyright, but isn't available for purchase and it isn't even feasible to determine who currently holds the copyright is just not ok.
I've always maintained that if we must have copyright then it should be something like a trademark where you have to actively defend it to keep it valid. If you have the "rights" to a piece of music, movie or game then, to validate the copyright's original purpose, you will have to actively exercise those rights to make gains from the "intellectual property". Copyright does not promote innovation if you're not required to gain from your creation: if you're just keeping your work in a drawer there's no point in granting you a temporary monopoly over the right to copy the work.
The reality is that the vast majority of entertainment is ephemeral. A videogame or movie get it's 5 minutes of fame. There are a few weirdos like me who want to play a 20 year old videogame but how much money can you get out of that and is it worth the trouble?
If you haven't seen it, and aren't inclined to play it, there are some good playthroughs on youtube to get a sense of what it's about.
I also remember reading articles in Game Developer magazine about how sophisticated the AI in NOLF2 was. Wish I could find that article
People are talking about putting somewhat severe, I think, limitations on ownership and property. Are you sure you want these limitations? Fairness under law means if it applies to a game, it also applies to you and what you own. Hot takes on the topic don't seem to have fully thought through the implications on that (tho I do understand people's feelings on the matter).
Now instead, works become inaccessible, out of print, and forgotten by the time it becomes public domain. The cult following, the fans, and the curious have long died out, leaving the work to pass into the abyss to join the works in the Library of Alexandria.
Relevant: NOLF Revival Edition (same as mentioned in the article and quoted article, but actual link):