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duh

Strife

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No.

IIRC, someone (possibly Quasar) asked one of the former members of was-it-Rogue-or-Velocity-I-forgot and that person answered that they had no idea but maybe the rights reverted to Id. I'm not sure how Id could claim rights on anything Strife-related beyond the engine, however (and perhaps a few sprites which appear to have been traced from Doom sprites).

For all intents and purposes, Strife is an orphaned work.

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Gez said:

No.

IIRC, someone (possibly Quasar) asked one of the former members of was-it-Rogue-or-Velocity-I-forgot and that person answered that they had no idea but maybe the rights reverted to Id. I'm not sure how Id could claim rights on anything Strife-related beyond the engine, however (and perhaps a few sprites which appear to have been traced from Doom sprites).

For all intents and purposes, Strife is an orphaned work.

James Monroe was referring only to the code when he said that. I have no idea if that was based on something he knew about the agreement under which the code was licensed in the first place, or if he was just supposing it.

Either way, for Choco Doom's purposes, John Carmack's response was "I don't think anybody will care what you do with it."

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I really hope the situation can be resolved some day. I would love to see Strife getting actively sold again or released freeware.

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Cire said:

I really hope the situation can be resolved some day. I would love to see Strife getting actively sold again or released freeware.

In the era of modern copyright laws, companies would rather sit on media and let it rot than give it to the public without profit.

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Well it seems like the best shot would be to try to get into contact with Rogue Entertainment's owners. From what I understand they were a privately held company that simply shut down, so, at least in theory, they could possibly still own the IP. At the very least they should be able to tell you if Velocity took ownership in the publishing contract or not.

Edit: I should also mention, I took a quick look at the U.S. Copyright Office website. There does not appear to be a public record for Strife. IANAL, so I don't know if this has any implications or not. There is a dead trademark record however.

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Blzut3 said:

Edit: I should also mention, I took a quick look at the U.S. Copyright Office website. There does not appear to be a public record for Strife. IANAL, so I don't know if this has any implications or not.

IANAL either, but it does not. Copyright is automatic and instantaneous. There is no need for any formal process or declaration for it to apply.

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The best best shot is not to look for anyone related to Rogue; they didn't own the Strife IP. Velocity did.

The founder and CEO of Velocity was Moses Ma. He is an Asian American entrepreneur in the San Francisco area and can be found online pretty easily. I was actually able to get into contact with him accidentally by asking some questions of the late Morey Goldstein's wife - she forwarded my message to him to see if he knew any of the stuff she didn't.

Either way I'm not handing out contact info for either of these people as they are private citizens who aren't looking to be bothered by a lot of people on the internet dweebing it up. You should be able to find Moses Ma with a Google search though because, last time I checked, he had an extensive webpage/blog up detailing some of his personal activities and religious beliefs.

Since he owned the company, then the rights might have gone back to him when it was divested. If you ask ME the best thing to happen would be for Strife to be released to the public domain, not for it to end up on GoG or Steam. Then we can all end this charade of acting like we're going to get in trouble for distributing it, or that refraining from playing it unless you have an actual boxed copy is somehow a matter of ethics or benefits anybody at all in any way imaginable.

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I still want definitive information on the rights to PowerSlave and Chasm. As for Chasm, I'd assume Action Forms as they were the dev, but maybe Wizard Works. I don't know if AF is dead or not though, or where Tatem Games got the Carnivores rights.

And Strife s pretty good, and public domain would be the better option if any.

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Quasar said:

Since he owned the company, then the rights might have gone back to him when it was divested.

I contacted him. He said that it was too long ago and has no idea how to help find the owner. :/ I guess if there's no chance Rogue ever owned the IP, then there's no chance of finding the owner at this point.

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Blzut3 said:

I contacted him. He said that it was too long ago and has no idea how to help find the owner. :/ I guess if there's no chance Rogue ever owned the IP, then there's no chance of finding the owner at this point.

If he doesn't know, I doubt anybody knows 6_9

EDIT: The Securities and Exchange Commission does.
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/826595/0000826595-97-000015.txt

Looks to me like Velocity Inc was folded into a privately owned company belonging to the "TECHNOLOGY FUNDING VENTURE PARTNERS IV" partnership called Multiport, Inc. This is a common reaction when investments in a company are tanking; take it private, and move whatever assets it still has somewhere else.

So, now, what is Multiport, Inc.? Does it still exist? Has it in turn changed hands many times since then?

EDIT 2:
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/826595/0000826595-99-000002.txt

SEC said:
In 1997, Multiport, Inc., which was wholly owned by the Partnership, ceased operations and was liquidated, resulting in a cash distribution to the Partnership of $1,929,078 and a realized gain of $1,131,678.

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So, now, what is The Partnership? Does it still exist? Has it in turn changed hands many times since then?

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Fuzzyfireball said:

We must go deeper...

You simply can't. Liquidation means an itemized list of the company's assets were sold off to anonymous (apparently, at least) buyers. Whether or not Velocity, Inc.'s intellectual property assets were enumerated as part of the sell-off of Multiport, Inc., is impossible to know without the ledgers and bookkeeping of the accountants that were involved.

They could have been:

  • Meticulously enumerated and sold off to individual buyers.
  • Forgotten entirely by that point and left out of the sale.
  • Known, but left out of the company's valuation anyway because they were considered to be worthless.
  • Already moved internally to some other company. If this happened, there's no SEC record of it, but I don't know that they record every minor transfer of assets between wholly owned corporations in the first place.
In finding this information I've taken us exactly nowhere. You'd now need to once again be someone who was intimately involved in the sale-off of this company to know what happened - or be the person that actually bought any of the Velocity IP rights, provided they were made part of the sale. If someone DID buy them, they clearly have no knowledge of what they're sitting on or they'd have at the least made it available on GoG by now.

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Quasar said:

Looks to me like Velocity Inc was folded into a privately owned company belonging to the "TECHNOLOGY FUNDING VENTURE PARTNERS IV" partnership called Multiport, Inc. This is a common reaction when investments in a company are tanking; take it private, and move whatever assets it still has somewhere else.


So to quote what the document says:

In September of 1996, Multiport, Inc., ("Multiport"), which is wholly
owned by the Partnership, purchased all of the Partnership's Velocity
Incorporated ("Velocity") notes receivable
and the related common
share warrant for $900,000, and assumed the first $500,000 of the
Partnership's $2,000,000 guarantee on Velocity's line of credit with a
financial institution. In October, 1996, Multiport paid the financial
institution $500,000 and assumed the note. See Note 10 for additional
discussion.

It doesn't say that Multiport bought up Velocity's assets (ie. IP). "Notes receivable" means "claims for which formal instruments of credit are issued as evidence of debt". It sounds like they bought up the rights to money that Velocity was still owed? But the next part is more interesting:

Based on the fair value of Multiport's underlying net assets at
December 31, 1996, the Partnership recorded a fair value decrease of
$700,522 for its investments. Multiport's assets consist of remaining
net proceeds to be received from a 1994 asset sale agreement, cash and
notes receivable from Velocity.

Money from an "asset sale", cash and debt still owed to the company. The wording is important - it doesn't necessarily imply a sale that took place in 1994, but perhaps rather a sale according to an agreement made in 1994 - when the company was founded? Maybe there was an agreement that in the event of the company being dissolved, the assets (which would presumably include Strife) would be sold off to pay debts? If that's the case, Strife wouldn't have been owned by Multiport - it would have been sold off to someone else. Who knows who?

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fraggle said:

Who knows who?

One way to find out would be by bootlegging the game, then see who/what crawls out of the woodwork to protest.

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GreyGhost said:

One way to find out would be by bootlegging the game, then see who/what crawls out of the woodwork to protest.


Heh, I couldn't shake this thought out of my head.

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fraggle said:

So I contacted one of the main Rogue guys on Twitter and he responded to me. I've followed up to his responses so there may be further discussion.


Good stuff, very interesting. Great to hear they've been trying to get the rights back (meaning, they're still interested in the IP).

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At least he was able to confirm that the IP went down on the ship with Velocity. Unfortunately nobody formerly involved with Velocity seems to know (or probably care) where its assets went >_>

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Quasar said:

At least he was able to confirm that the IP went down on the ship with Velocity. Unfortunately nobody formerly involved with Velocity seems to know (or probably care) where its assets went >_>

That's not entirely clear yet either. He says:

We tried to re-acquire the rights but with Velocity bankrupt for a decade or so, it's been tough to get a definitive answer.

If they've been "trying to reacquire the rights" that might mean there's some entity holding them that they're trying to acquire them from. Hopefully we'll find out more when he responds to my latest round of messages.

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fraggle said:

So I contacted one of the main Rogue guys on Twitter and he responded to me. I've followed up to his responses so there may be further discussion.

Has there been any follow-up? You have locked your profile so it's not possible anymore to check the conversation.

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