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Comment by _fat_santa | Hacker News Reader

Going down the rabbit hole of some of the referenced articles. I read this one [1] about Microsoft's attempts to resurrect the game. The problem seems to be the license agreement does not allow MS to release the game as a standalone copy. Not a lawyer but wouldn't it be pretty easy for MS to just re-license it? MS has a market cap of 2.3T, I think they could swing it without too much of a sweat.

[1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20181221-00/?p=10...

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Judging by Cinematronics and the long chain of purchases, closures and divestures, it wouldn't surprise me if there wasn't anybody who even knows who the hell owns the rights at this point. Unfortunately for Microsoft, they're very worth suing and consider it not worth it to have that exposure over Space Cadet Pinball.

We have the trail, but it ends with EA, which uhh......

No need to relicense and release it again. Space Cadet is part of Full Tilt! Pinball which is hosted online at a certain abandonware website. Until Maxis (or EA) decides to release it again, just download a free copy of it. There are even instructions out there for getting it to work on Windows 10.

For a re-release by Microsoft to be legal Microsoft would have to come to some agreement with EA (or whoever owns the rights now).

Abandonware websites can kinda ignore minutiae like "copyright law", Microsoft can't.

Perhaps they could release it through a Windows XP 64-bit edition update? :D

According to David Stafford, one of the original developers, Microsoft may still have license to publish it as part of Windows, though the IP still belongs to EA[0]. The whole thread linked below contains a lot of info from the original devs of the game.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28861353

David Stafford here. Microsoft has the rights to publish it with Windows. My former Cinematronics co-founders (Mike Sandige, Kevin Gliner) and I would be happy to help it return, gratis.

Off topic, but one of the things I love most about HN is when a person referenced in an article/post/comment happens to be viewing it and chimes in with their first hand experience

> MS has a market cap of 2.3T, I think they could swing it without too much of a sweat.

I could imagine that the rightsholders are aware and would want to exploit it by charging fees significantly higher than what they'd normally charge for something like this, and thus Microsoft isn't biting.

> The problem seems to be the license agreement does not allow MS to release the game as a standalone copy.

They've included frickin' Candy Crush as part of Windows 10, so this would hardly be an obstacle to including Space Cadet again.

They presumably negotiated a license to include Candy Crush. The original makers of the pinball game may no longer be in business, or may not be responding to Microsoft’s emails.

The original devs are aware, and have unofficially suggested they'd be willing to help[0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28861353

Candy crush is a highly profitable "free-to-play" game that makes millions of dollars though in-app purchases.

I'm pretty sure King pay Microsoft for it to be included in windows, not the other way around.

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