**From the Abandonware Dept: “Let Us Play No One Lives Forever, You Assholes Day”**
One of my favorite things in all of professional sports is the unofficial holiday referred to as **“Bobby Bonilla Day.”** The short version is that Bonilla played for the New York Mets decades ago and eventually bought out his contract in 2000 when the team decided they were done with him.
Rather than pay the $5.9 million buyout upfront, the Mets made the bonkers decision to negotiate a deferred payment schedule for that amount with 8% interest over 25 years. The result? The Mets will be paying Bonilla $1.2 million every July 1st, starting in 2011 and ending in 2035.
If this math sounds confusing, it’s because Mets ownership was one of Bernie Madoff’s many victims, which is why they had to defer the payments.
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**November 10th is not Bobby Bonilla Day. But it should be “Let Us Play No One Lives Forever, You Assholes Day.”**
Why? Because on that date, the classic spy-shooter *No One Lives Forever* turned 25 years old, and for the exact same reasons we’ve been detailing for over a decade, you still can’t buy the game.
Here’s the short of it: due to a series of mergers, closures, and rights purchases, the intellectual property rights for *No One Lives Forever* and its sequel have potentially been split into three pieces among Warner Bros., Activision, and 20th Century Fox. Like some kind of dark horcrux.
I say “potentially” because nobody really knows who owns what — if anyone — when it comes to these games.
When one company, Nightdive Studios, attempted to remaster and re-release *No One Lives Forever* (as they’ve done with other classic titles), they also sought to secure trademark rights for the game, which hasn’t been sold for over a decade. In response, all three companies claimed they might have rights and threatened to sue over the attempt.
All of those qualifiers exist because even these companies themselves don’t know the full extent of their rights.
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**Why the confusion?**
The gaming rights deals were inked before digital storage was widely used, and now nobody seems able to locate the actual paperwork denoting who owns what.
Here’s an example of an exchange Nightdive had with Activision:
> “So we went back to Activision and, after numerous correspondences back and forth, they replied that they thought they might have some rights, but that any records predated digital storage. So we’re talking about a contract in a box someplace.”
Nightdive’s Kuperman laughed:
> “The image I get is the end of *Indiana Jones*. Somewhere in a box, maybe in the bowels of Activision, maybe it was shipped off to Iron Mountain or somewhere. And they confessed, they didn’t have [their] hands on it. And they weren’t sure that they even had any of those rights.”
Which didn’t stop Activision from warning Nightdive that it might sue if they moved forward with remastering the game. The other companies made similar noises.
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**So, what’s a person to do if they want to play *No One Lives Forever*?**
You can’t buy it legitimately right now. It’s not for sale anywhere.
Situations like this, which I’ve mentioned before, completely break the copyright bargain. The only option—as Kotaku points out—is to download it for free from somewhere.
Downloading games that are otherwise available for purchase is piracy—illegal and harmful to developers.
But when companies refuse to sell a game for nearly two decades, it’s a very different situation.
Look, I’m not your mom or dad, and I can’t tell you what to do. But if you were to download both games (as well as the spin-off *Contract J.A.C.K.*), you’d end up with modernized versions of these classics. Thanks to mods, they work on Windows 10 and 11 and support widescreen.
And what better time to do (or not do) this than on the game’s 25th anniversary?
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At this point (just as it was over eight years ago when I last suggested downloading the games, to no negative response), we must consider *No One Lives Forever* to be **abandonware**.
No one is willing to take ownership. Those that could sometimes threaten legal action to stop anyone else from rebuilding or re-releasing it for sale.
Nightdive was scared off a decade ago, and the game has been sitting on GOG’s Dreamlist since it launched earlier this year—with 87,171 people saying they would pay for it if they could.
It’s far too small a concern for the mega-corporations who might own it to spend the time and money figuring out if they do, but it’s far too big of a concern in gaming history to be allowed to just disappear.
Thank goodness for the anonymous heroes running **NOLF Revival**—I thank them for their service.
It’s truly the only option the public has to play and appreciate this small piece of our collective culture.
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**The real answer?**
Some form of copyright reform that prevents situations like this.
If a company or group of companies won’t offer a work for sale, can’t figure out what they own, and have no plans to do so—how can this be copyright infringement?
So, happy “Let Us Play No One Lives Forever, You Assholes Day.” Maybe, by the time Bobby Bonilla stops cashing those checks, we’ll finally be able to buy this game legitimately.
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/11/13/no-one-lives-forever-turns-25-you-still-cant-buy-it-legitimately/