Switch Online’s N64 ‘Mature’ App Expands With Two More Games

Aside from how strange it is to see an age-restricted video on Nintendo (even the Emio trailers weren’t restricted), the copyrights on these games are… To say the least confusing. Shadow Man as a license is indeed still controlled by Valiant’s corpse so this makes sense; but Turok is Penguin Random House? I thought it ended up under Comcast control.

But the real question mark is why they both call it “Night Dive Studios”. The end of each legal notice specifies that it is indeed Nightdive Studios which represents half of Atari’s current development resources. Now Wade Rosen made a big show of buying “most” of Accolade, but when he finally (finally) released a full asset count of Atari’s current IP log in August, only 11 of the 90 or so IPs controlled by Accolade at the time of its disappearance are listed. as belonging to the current iteration. Although several Intellivision IPs are counted multiple times, Microscope is somehow one of the largest sections despite being the only midway one that still exists (despite everything).

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1e-tl9Oqwnr78879Lnne_uhlsGkPWFK_z428ZmUaJjog/edit?usp=sharing

Now note that Nightdive has its own section with Digital Eclipse (and ignore Intellivision’s duplicates and the random appearance of Other Ocean’s IDARB), and yet it only lists 5 IPs specifically for them. One of them is the System Shock series, co-owned by Tencent, and none of them mention partial ownership of Accolade’s licensed games.

THQNordic inherited the code rights for all original THQ licensed games; this is how Rehydrated can exist, but THQ was a much cleaner mass batch. Accolade has been split and resold so many times that it’s a mistreated and mutilated Frankenstein. Even more than Atari itself which is in 3 known quantities: Atari 7, Warner Bros Discovery and Songbird. Accolade is still missing parts in Canada and parts of China.

All that to say: NoA Licensing Legal knows the secrets of the universe that keep me up at night. Howl