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Hot off of the release of the Star Wars: Dark Forces Remaster, Nightdive Studios is once again campaigning for the chance to revive the cult classic FPS series No One Lives Forever.
Way back in 2019, Nightdive CEO Stephen Kick hit social media to ask Disney for the opportunity to build a remaster of Dark Forces—a dream that ultimately paid off earlier this year. Now, Kick is repeating the tactic on Twitter: "Hey WB Games, can we do a remaster of No One Lives Forever, please? Signed, everyone who likes this tweet."
Nightdive specializes in retro remakes and remasters, building very well-regarded revivals of titles like Turok, Quake, and System Shock over the past several years. Dark Forces may have already had an excellent fan remaster, but Nightdive brought an equally excellent upgrade of the Star Wars game to a much larger audience - all while successfully navigating whatever Disney licensing maze stood in the way.
Hey @wbgames can we @NightdiveStudio do a remaster of No One Lives Forever, please? Signed, everyone who likes this tweet. https://t.co/D5N0WVr90PMarch 19, 2024
But perhaps no licensing challenge is more labyrinthine than that of No One Lives Forever. Originally developed by Monolith Software in the early 2000s, the two games quickly captured the hearts of shooter fans. They blended FPS gameplay with a load of well-considered stealth mechanics, a totally mod '60s aesthetic, and a charming sense of humor. The two campaigns quickly came to be regarded among the best single-player FPS experiences ever made, but the march of technology just as quickly made them challenging to run on increasingly modern PCs.
WB Games would eventually acquire Monolith, and under that banner, it's been known for titles like Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and the upcoming Wonder Woman game. So you'd think that WB would have the rights now. Well, that's what Nightdive itself thought, but in an extensive 2015 Kotaku interview, studio bosses explained that the truth was far more complicated.
You see, WB might have the rights to No One Lives Forever through its ownership of the original developer, Monolith. But the rights might have belonged to Fox Interactive, a 20th Century Fox division that was eventually purchased by Vivendi Universal Games. Vivendi then eventually merged with Activision.
Nightdive went back and forth with representatives from all three potential No One Lives Forever rights-holders - WB, Fox, and Activision - but nobody knew who actually had those rights. The Activision rep suggested that the original contract would've predated digital storage, so proof of ownership might literally be buried in a box somewhere in one of those three corporate offices. And none of the three companies were willing to sign off on a remaster for fear that one of the other two would dispute the ownership.
The end of that Kotaku feature suggests that Nightdive had given up on No One Lives Forever way back in 2015. Since then, of course, Fox was acquired by Disney, and Activision was acquired by Microsoft, adding two more steps of removal for wherever these rights ended up. The difference now is that Dark Forces and Quake mean Nightdive already has a working relationship with Disney and Microsoft, so maybe the studio will meet with less resistance this time around.
The other key change since 2015 is that fans have built patches to get both No One Lives Forever games - and the generally maligned spin-off, Contract Jack - up and running on modern PCs. The catch is that you can only get these patches alongside pirated copies of the original games. But hey, if nobody knows who actually owns the rights to the originals, I guess there's nobody around to care if you pirate them.
Our list of the best FPS games tends toward the more modern, but there are plenty of great shooters that haven't been lost to time.
