I was speaking more in general terms than this specific instance. Take for example Broderbund:
- purchased by the learning company, which got bought by softkey
- combined company was sold to mattel
- mattel interactive was sold to gores technology group
- gores sold some to ubisoft and some to riverdeep
- products were published by encore under license from riverdeep
- riverdeep merged with houghton mifflin and later acquired harcourt to become houghton mifflin harcourt
- hmh went through two rounds of restructuring and a recapitalization
- encore went through some buying/selling/bankruptcy themselves
Who owns the IP? Did it survive all the way to hmh and stay through the restructurings?
I've looked up some bankruptcy records for other smaller software companies, and they've had hundreds of debtors, some of which themselves have since went bankrupt.
You can't say that and be sure. You don't know what the terms of those licenses are, nor do you know what the deal with ubi/riverdeep is. For all we know the ownership of the rights mightn't belong to any of the companies listed, and might belong to one of the people involved!
Of course we can't be sure who owns the IP. Doesn't mean we can't make an educated guess.
The OP is only trying to figure out whom to contact first about the IP. The worst that can happen is that a company replies it's not with them.
A merging/acquisition will transfer all IP to the (new) parent company. A contracting company will grant a license to make one game, not reassign all its IP to the game studio.
I don't think OPs guess is in any way educated. The whole point of this thread is that the rights for these games are complicated, and assuming that the most straightforward explanation is true is just wrong.
> A merging/acquisition will transfer all IP to the (new) parent company.
That's a bold statement that is definitely not always true. There are many reasons why it wouldn't happen, either the acquisition wasn't done properly, or maybe the IP might be kept to ensure any liability would fall on the acquired company.
>. A contracting company will grant a license to make one game, not reassign all its IP to the game studio.
Again, that's the most _likely_ explanation, but there are other very possible ones such as - the company who granted the rights to a contractor didn't have the rights to grant them in the first place, or they granted all rights to games of an IP (see EA and star wars), or some sort of right of first refusal.
If those people are still alive! Unfortunately, I found an obituary when looking up one bankruptcy asset owner: never married, only child, whose parents had died prior. No idea what next of kin looks like for that.
To be fair to them, this is the company that re-released remastered X-Com games, along with the Mafia games.
I wouldn't expect to see Dizzy happen again, but you never know...