FYI the Flashback devies were made by the company now known as ATARI (who purchased the rights to the name and the ip for the games from Hasbro well before they made the flashback).
Hasbro did re-releases during their brief tenure as owner of the IP but got rid of the brand rather quickly. I spoke to one insider who revealed the process of getting the Flashbacks out was a big legal hassle and in the end the project wasn't a money maker for them when you considered the NRE costs. Jakks Pacific was able make the number work on their TV games becuase all the tooling and majority of dev work is done in China (as cheap as humanly possible) so NRE costs were much cheper than using USA counterparts. Also Jakks legendary ability to fill a mass market supply chain and secured retailer space certainly helped.
Thank you. I was minutely aware of some sordid circumstances of this three-way adventure, but not to this detail. I own the original Flashback -- I actually had two, but gave one away after opening and trying out the abomination, keeping one unopened for future value. I never bought the Flashback 2, and I lament buying the joystick. In fact, Jakks Pacific has tromped on my good memories of the Atari 2600 with its horrible hardware renditions: the damned things do not appear to have a noise generator, which has ruined "Missile Command." However, if you do not have the original hardware, it is okay for nostalgic and educational purposes.
None the less, there was and obviously remains a market from which the producers can make a profit. I am perfectly fine with a $20 joystick with five or ten games in it, but I absolutely refuse to pay $20 for a DS cartridge with a single 25 year-old game in it. I have a bunch of Atari games on CD which were the 3D remakes -- quite good ones, actually -- and the companion emulation of the originals for $10 ea.
The best course of action is to release these to the public domain for sure. At this point it's more about historical preservation and educational purposes. Histroy is written by the victors but if you speak to the hardcore in the industry and they are well aware of the contributions the Amiga made to the industry. It's up to us "old timers" to school the "young bloods" on this history.
I partially agree with this. The horrendous extension of the "Mickey Mouse" copyright laws (what are they, 100 years now?) has been and will be a great detriment to us all. That having been said, I do not see any issue with a company making money on a product which has a market, irrespective of whether the original market is dead, such as the original 2600 consoles, or just aged and looking for regeneration, in emulation, for instance. At the same time, the source code for a number of Atari 2600 and 7800 titles have been released for public consumption.
As a corollary, I could support a requirement on companies exercising their rights after having let them languish for a period of time to produce a modern replacement for the original works. Licensing to Jakks Pacific for production, for instance, would satisfy this requirement.
I maintain preservation and education by way of owning a couple of the original consoles and scads of the original games. I keep them all working, and I also have abused the pirating world by "profiting" from the hard work of others to dump the ROMs so as to maintain a working digital copy should anything happen to the hardware. That way I can make a new cartridge if necessary. I also support making multi-carts using ROMs which you rightfully own. (Rightfully owning spawns a conversation itself, but suffice to say that, in my circumstances, I mean that I have possession of the physical cartridges and matching game consoles.)
What I do see are companies publishing games on a case by case basis. Pinball Dreams, Super Stardust, etc. If you port the game to a different platform you avoid the whole Amiga rom issue. Emulation seems to leave a bad taste in the mouth of IP holders as they are not administering the sale of the games. At least with WII Iphone and XBlive you have a copy protection system in place.
A more constructive course of action could be to campaining XBlive, Apple or other publishers to re-relase these gems on modern hardware.
Let the big boys deal with each other? Sounds interesting.
