During a recent interview with Time Extension, the designer of the classic Discworld point-and-click adventures from the ’90s, Gregg Barnett, revealed something interesting. Remasters of the games may finally be happening after years of confusion over who owns the rights.
The series of games were based on the beloved series of novels by the late Terry Pratchett and were released between 1995-2000. The series consisted of Discworld, Discworld II: Missing Presumed…!?, and Discworld Noir. All three games were originally released for PCs and the games also saw ports for the PlayStation and Sega Saturn, and were made with the input of Prachett who helped with editing the dialogue in the game to keep it true to the books.
It was believed for years that the rights around the game were stuck in limbo due to most of the companies involved in their creation getting absorbed by a larger company or going out of business altogether, but Barnett gave some hope for fans of the beloved games when Time Extension asked about a possible re-release. Specifically, Barnett was asked if any retro publishers had tried to contact him to try and pick up the trail of where the rights may be, and the response was as follows:
“Yeah! We are a little bit beyond that point. I don’t want to give you a scoop, but a Discworld re-release may happen. The original rights are complicated in the UK, but it turns out that 50% reverted to me as the creator because the company Perfect Entertainment had been closed for over 10 years.”
“Whenever something closes in the UK, intellectual property rights revert 50% to the original creator and 50% to the crown, which is King Charles. So that’s the two owners of the games. So yes, there have been discussions and something may be happening down the track – a rerelease or a remaster. But it’s obviously a complicated process when you’re dealing with the crown.”
He would go onto state
“[A rerelease is] on the cards. It may happen. And then it could advance to new versions of them. And again, I said, I would like to do a new Discworld game. But beyond all of the stuff that may or may not happen [like] the old versions, it’s just going to be hard to get the rights to do anything new in the Discworld universe at the moment.”
The interview is a good one and we encourage you to read the full interview with Barnett here.
