I just had the passing Idea that it might be fun, for the purposes of collection and conversation to purchase the rights to a classic video game---the intellectual property behind it--ownership of the stories, characters, universe, etc. Does anybody have experience in this area? Now, I'm sure I couldn't afford anything remotely decent--but perhaps I could get my hands on something incredibly obscure that I liked as a kid.
There was that guy who picked up the trademark to "River City Ransom" when it expired, if that counts. I think most of the collectors with the money to buy an entire franchise outright usually prefer to keep bidding up the price of NES World Championship carts instead.
I kinda doubt any game company that owns them would be likely to give the rights up, especially with the retro community growing. Your best bet would be when a company goes bankrupt, usually the auction to get money for the creditors includes all IPs.
I knew a guy who tried this, don't remember the IP but he got it cheap, what was really fucking expensive was the whole process to find out who the hell owned it at the time since it had been inactive for almost 20 years and the company that created it was acquired and sold 3 times and the last owner was some shady nevada shell corporation whose owners had used fictitious names (one of the benefits from incorporating in that state) so it was nigh impossible to track them. He ended up paying some lawyer that represented them only $500 fot the whole thing, but iirc he wasted near $10k to track the owner.
Didn't ASSEMbler bid for the rights to some franchise(s) in the Acclaim auctions? IIRC he didn't actually win.
The Acclaim ones were auctioned later, minimum $10k per title, which is common. You're not going to get a professionally developed IP for much less than that. Most sell for a lot more.
Specially since most of acclaim's IPs still had/have plenty of value, for example Turok On the other hand who the hell cares about Bubsy the bobcat?
I think the best ones to go for would be completely uncared about franchises that made no notable games at all. Bubsy is too well known, someone might want to rerelease it just to get the "OOOH SHITTY GAME" notoriety (see: Shaq Fu's indiegogo). I'd go for Awesome Possum.
This was the sort of experience I expect. I suppose your friend got lucky that the company was straight-up purchased again and again. Relatively easy to track ownership when someone buys the whole thing. I just had the realization that if someone simply purchased the assets of a company I'd be hard-pressed to find a record of it.
