Tequila Works, the beloved Madrid-based indie studio responsible for titles like Rime, filed for insolvency back in 2024 because of "prolonged market conditions." Now, the studio's assets – including the full rights to many of its games and several new IPs that were in development at the time of its shutdown – are for sale at an online auction site, and many of those properties are currently available for a song.
The goods are all for sale at Escrapalia, a Spanish online auction site that appears to specialize in selling surplus goods and assets from company liquidations, including everything from computer components to fishing boats. Suffice to say that video game IP rights look a bit unusual among the site's other goods, but you'll find all of Tequila Works' assets listed as if this was eBay.
Those assets include items like the trademark and IP rights for Rime, Deadlight, The Invisible Hours, and Gylt. The Rime listing, for example, promises deliver of "the exploitation rights of the video game 'RiME,' as well as the rights to receive royalties, which are subject to the limitations established in the current contract with Grey Box (Game Development and Publishing Agreement), which restricts their assignment without express consent." If you're the lucky bidder, you'll be given "a hard drive with all the information related to the game."
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The current bid for Rime is at the equivalent to $17,500 USD, so it might not be priced for a casual purchase, but there are some items here that might be, including new in-development IPs. There's The Ancient Mariner, an open-world narrative game with a "systemic emotional system," Dungeon Tour, a co-op party game described as "a conceptual mix between Overcooked and Dungeon Keeper," and Brawler Crawler, an old-school brawler set in city streets with "procedurally generated lanes."
Those items are each going for the equivalent of $305 USD, so if you want a piece of gaming history, well... get it and make sure it's preserved by proper historians. The rights to the Tequila Works name itself are also going for that same price, but with just over a month left on all these auctions, there's no telling where the bids will end up.
Tequila Works was one of the video game industry's many causalities in 2024, and seeing so much the studio's work chopped up and resold on an eBay-style auction site is more than a little sad. I just hope whoever ends up with these rights figures out a way to do right by the legacy of these games – we've got more than enough zombie brands reselling other people's work these days.
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