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

Putting aside how strange it is to see an age restricted video on Nintendo (not even the Emio trailers were restricted) the copyright on these games is… Confusing to say the least. Shadow Man as a license is indeed still controlled by the corpse of Valiant so that makes sense; but Turok is Penguin Random House? I thought it had ended up under the control of Comcast.

But the real question mark is why they both call out “Night Dive Studios.” The end of each legal clarifies that this indeed refers to the Nightdive Studios that makes up 1/2 of the current Atari’s dev resources. Now, Wade Rosen made a big show of buying “most” of Accolade, but when he eventually (finally) released a full asset count of Atari’s current IP log in August, only 11 of the around 90 IP Accolade controlled at it’s demise are listed as owned by the current iteration. Although several Intellivision IP are counted multiple times, and Microscope is somehow one of the larger sections despite being the midway only one that still exits (despite it all).

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

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

THQNordic did inherit the code rights for all of the original THQ’s licensed games; this is how Rehydrated can exist, but THQ was a much cleaner mass lot. Accolade has been divied up and re-sold so many times it’s an abused and mangled Frankenstein. Even more than Atari itself which is in 3 known quantities: Atari 7, Warner Bros Discovery, and Songbird. Accolade still has pieces missing in Canada and parts of China.

All this is to say: the NoA licensing legal department knows the secrets to the universe that keep me up at night. Screaming