(re: Which games are now public domain?)
Ken,
> Alas, happy endings and Sierra don’t always seem to go
> hand-in-hand. Monsieur Messier had his own scandal
> brewing. I have since forgotten what the scandal was, but
> the bottom line was that Vivendi stock crashed, and Mr.
> Messier was tossed out.
He was victim of the Internet and mobile phones crash. When he became CEO of once was “Générale des Eaux”, he transformed what was a century-old National water company into a modern new-technology and communication company, progressively buying successful smaller companies. Havas was one of them, although it was already a very big company. Other companies included Canal + (a French pay-TV that finance most of the French movies), and Cegetel, which includes the second French mobile phone company, SFR. After renaming the company to Vivendi, he made it merge with Universal roughly at the time the IT stock exchange crashed. Most of the newly-acquired companies did poorly the following year, and Mr Messier was laid off as a result. It also happened to the CEO (Michel Bon) of the French first telephone and mobile phone company, France Telecom.
On the matter of you helping VU Games, I would suggest to use what Vivendi still holds, and more precisely SFR, the mobile phone company. When Vivendi merged with Universal, the mother company decided to sell music from the Universal catalogue to SFR users. I think this did quite well, but I do not think this has really been done with the VU Games catalogue, although the market is really heading towards mobile phone games. I would imagine that games like Gobliiins or Dr. Brain could be very fun to play on mobile phones, and quite easy to port. Even Powerchess could be resurected on mobiles phones.
Of course, I suppose no one could possibly listen to me at Vivendi, but I’m sure you can be taken very seriously if they ever want to listen to you. Sierra glory restoration would be very welcome, and I’m sure many fans would like to see it.
Also, BTW, maybe my older post about imaging your collection of games was pushed too far when you were hard at work finishing the new version of your software. I have to add that it seems to be quite complicated to properly configure a machine for Disk2FDI, so I could be of help for this, at least. In any case, you said you wouldn’t come to Seattle before May, so we have some time.
Vincent.