The Zelda CD-i Community often wanders about who owns the rights of the Nintendo licensed CD-i titles like Hotel Mario, Link: Faces of Evil and Zelda: Wand of Gamelon. While these titles are officially licensed by Nintendo, does that mean any publishing rights are with Nintendo? As for the rights of Philips CD-i publishing, Philips sold the CD-i catalogue to Infogrames around 1996, excluding local publishing deals in European countries like Germany and The Netherlands. Infogrames eventually turned into Atari, but they went bankrupt, merged and splitted several times. When you try to find who owns the current rights of specific CD-i titles, even Atari doesn know immediately. Thankfully, specific parts of the CD-i rights catalogue were recently sold to three parties. Piko Interactive for example obtained certain rights including some SPC Vision titles, but also UK based Subvert obtained several CD-i rights, most notably the catalogue of former Philips POV.
CD-i member cdifan is contacted a few times to offer assistence in getting specific assets out of CD-i titles, as he is very knowledgeable about these insides; therefor he knows some more details. cdifan: "Philips Media sold all of it's CD-i rights to Infogrames a long time ago. Infogrames trough a number of mergers/acquisitions/renames is now Atari S.A, France. It is possible to get CD-i rights, I know of several companies that have done so. But it will cost you some nontrivial amount of money. That being said, current Atari S.A. knows next to nothing about their CD-i portfolio. So if you need details about licensing rights, you are probably out of luck unless you can get some lawyers / accountants paid to really dig into this. This probably will really cost money. To just get a rights transfer will be [expensive], if my information is correct. The problem is that you will get the rights that Atari has, but it can be very unclear exactly what those are..."
The only CD-i rights which have materialized recently are a couple of CD-i games being re-released by Pixel Games through Steam, all of them being owned nowadays by Subvert.
- Writer/Editor: Morton
- Credits: cdifan
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