Could EA legally re-release Future Cop LAPD on GOG and Origin?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Cop:_LAPD mentions that EA Redwood Shores/Visceral (r.i.p.) made the game and EA published it, so I'm wondering if EA and GOG could work together to get that onto GOG and Origin. The reason I bring it up is that GOG and Techland re-released a game "Crime Cities" with a similar futuristic setting, and somebody on the release thread was asking about Future Cop.
@tfishell Well, the AnswersHQ is, mostly, a support site, with its users trying to solve the easier problems encountered by other gamers. Sometimes we can help, other times we redirect to them to the EA support. Community managers may be able or not to answer the questions about the legal status if they are allowed, but you have better chances emailing the owners of the IP's. A couple of weeks ago, someone from this very boards enquired about the status of the Battle for Middle Earth series and in the end he got the answer from the Tolkien estates (Middle-Earth Enterprises), which still had EA listed as a license owner, but their answer indicated that it wasn't actually the case, but they are aware of the interest to see the games on sale again (Warner is now the owner of the license for developing videogames, so EA can't sell or develop anything new in that Universe.
In this particular case, EA is clearly the owner of the IP, so, you might get an answer from the community managers (the people with EA_name).
Some of the most asked old games on the boards are: Sims 1/2, Sims Life Stories Series (Life, Pets, Castaway), the old NFS games, the Command and Conquer series, the old Battlefield games, pre-Bad Company 2.
There are also requests for other series, but those are lost licenses: Dune (Herbert estate stated clearly that they have no interest in renewing the license or giving it for the development of new videogames), the Harry Potter games made by EA (license now to Warner, JK Rowling has no interest to renew it for EA), the sports games series (those are too expensive in our days, so i doubt that EA will even try to renew those), the Middle-Earth series (Warner has the license for now, but it looks like the Tolkien estate is at least open for discussions), the James Bond games made by EA (especially Nightfire), but Bond is now with Activision, so no actual chances to see those back anytime soon.
I hope i gave you a picture of the boards requests for old games not available for sale anywhere for now. As you can see, the requests are for the more popular games.
Personally, I would love to see stuff like Road Rash, the Strike series (Desert, Jungle, Urban, Nuclear), Armies of Exigo (this one is a bit in a legal limbo, i think) and maybe the rest of Theme games.
