A little curiosity about SWAT 4
Posted: 30 Mar 2015, 13:55
So PC Gamer just came up with a very good article about old games and their rights, and i just found a section about SWAT 4 and the SWAT rights.
Sad story. Maybe we won't get another game just like SWAT 4, but hope dies last. If you are interested, you can read the whole article right here.A spinoff of the Police Quest series, SWAT 4 was developed by Irrational Games and published by Vivendi Universal and Sierra Entertainment.
"The IP holder for SWAT4 was Sierra who was part of Vivendi at the time," SWAT 4 designer Paul Hellquist told PC Gamer. "Vivendi then sold off all of their interactive stuff and Sierra disappeared. I’m not sure where the IP ownership ended up. Activision has started up a Sierra label again, but I don’t know if they just got the rights to use the name or if they also got the IPs."
When reached for comment, an Activision representative said the company's legal department was unable to devote resources into seeing if the company had a claim over the SWAT 4 IP. Given that Activision's legal team couldn't even be bothered to look into the issue, it doesn't seem like a SWAT 4 resurrection is very high on the company's list of priorities. Major bummer.