Why are forgotten games so hard to look up?

[Daehawk]

Just now Im trying to remember an older space strategy game. All I remember is the ships of the humans had round engines and the intro was voiced by a girl that had a lisp and sounded like Gillian Anderson but wasn't. Took me a while but finally found it ....Sword of the Stars. And then I only remembered it because I saw the name Sword in another game. The so called 'huge' site I was on didn't even list it. Also it was a couple years older than I thought. I really thought it came out the year Sins of a Solar Empire was released ...2008...but it was 2006 instead.

And yeah I still have trouble accepting it was that long ago. Have I not played a good space strategy since the 2000's!??

I could sure use a big detailed site where I put in stuff like human ships round engines and intro voiced by girl with lisp. This is 2017 and we dont have this tech??

[Anonymous Bosch]

[Daehawk]

Im not sure whats worse...not being able to remember a game or not being able to find it in my collection when I do remember it. This one I know I own in a box. I know the cover and it was 2006 so digi wasn't that huge. Yet I cant find it.

[jztemple2]

I think this just means you are experienced and wise enough to have such a great store of memories that sometimes you can't recall a particular one.

Damn, I'm going to have to remember that one when my wife forgets something

[Rumpy]

www.mobygames.com is your friend for this. It's like the Internet Movie Database for games.

[Daehawk]

Wife says I have sometimers.

[KDH]

...

Look at it this way .. This will be the last game that you forget the name of because, as you get older, your memory gets better.


<*cough*>

[Daehawk]

Lol....wait where am I and why am I hear? At least i know who I am...Admiral Chekhov.

OH MobyGames! I used to use that site years ago. had forgotten about it. Ty.

[Buatha]

You should look up why no one has updated No One Lives Forever on gog.com. It's like they didn't keep records much.

[Anonymous Bosch]

You should look up why no one has updated No One Lives Forever on gog.com. It's like they didn't keep records much.

Because the NOLF games are trapped in ownership hell (though fortunately are at least available for download from NOLFrevival.tk):

No One Lives Forever, and its sequel A Spy In HARM’s Way, are infamously unavailable. Through the meticulous horrors of ownership rights across multiple publishers, and an apparent unwillingness by any involved to see it resolved, it’s not possible to buy either classic game anywhere.

Well guess what – there’s a way to get them anyway, and we super-encourage you to do so.

We have long lamented the unavailability of the No One Lives Forever games. I was recently moaning about it, sadly remembering the peculiar disappearance of the implied Night Dive version. Shortly after I posted that, Kotaku’s Kirk Hamilton got in touch with me to point out a splendid bit of digging he’d done a couple of years back to find out what happened to all that. Which was this:

Night Dive applied for the trademark since no one else held it, and confident they’d manage to get a straight answer out of people involved, had gotten access to the source code for both games. Things were looking positive, they were even working on marketing material, until the tangled mess of ownership proved impossible to disembroil. With three contenders – 20th Century Fox, Activision and Warner Bros – Night Dive sensibly assumed it really belonged to developer Monolith’s now owners, Warner. So they got in touch. But Warner quickly said Activision owned some of it too, and wanted them involved. Right, fine said Night Dive, and went over there. Activision then told them that, well, maybe they owned it a bit, they weren’t really sure, but if they did the contract wasn’t stored digitally, and was probably lost in a box somewhere. And Fox said exactly the same. I’m really not making this up.

But then Night Dive’s trademark application was made complicated when Warner Bros, despite refusing to claim ownership of the game, applied to extend their expired trademark of the name. Sigh. Night Dive reportedly tried to understand why, made repeated attempts to negotiate, but Warner showed no interest at all in even trying to make a deal, no matter how sweet Night Dive made it.

[Daehawk]

I have NOLF installed right now and been playing off and on. I think I got it at that dload site though I do own both on CD.

EDIT: After looking that is the same site I dloaded them from.

[Grifman]

Forgotten games are so hard to look up because you have forgotten them, duh!