So, the other day I was just out searching the web to see if there's been any progress in getting one of my all time favorite games - Discworld Noir - running smoothly on modern systems, when I stumbled upon this reddit thread. Apparently someone made Discworld Noir playable on a virtual machine in your browser!

Tried it out yesterday, and it seems to work just fine - the loading times are a bit long and saving your game is a bit of a hassle, but still interesting to see it running so smoothly/without crashes out of your browser. Maybe a proper GOG re-release isn't too far off? 

Anyway, figured it might be of interest to some of y'all as well!

Nice, I'll check it out later.

Sadly, this is yet another instance of running this game on a virtual machine that runs Windows 95.

Since a GOG release would require that no proprietary software (VM, OS, etc.) is being used, I'm afraid this doesn't increase the probability of a GOG release in any way.

Sadly, this is yet another instance of running this game on a virtual machine that runs Windows 95.

Since a GOG release would require that no proprietary software (VM, OS, etc.) is being used, I'm afraid this doesn't increase the probability of a GOG release in any way.

Aah, I didn't know that was the criteria for a GOG release. Well, no, in that case it's probably not any more likely.

I do recall reading somewhere that the rights to the Discworld games are 50% back with the creators (the other 50% weirdly having reverted into the british crown(!) due to some odd UK law), so maybe if that whole situation get sorted there's a better chance of it getting a re-release.

Discworld Noir is one of my all-time favourites. Each effort to make it playable on modern systems has my deep respect.

I do recall reading somewhere that the rights to the Discworld games are 50% back with the creators (the other 50% weirdly having reverted into the british crown(!) due to some odd UK law), so maybe if that whole situation get sorted there's a better chance of it getting a re-release.

Strange, I thought everybody agreed that the rights to all Discwold games now belong to Moist von Lipwig through a tier of shell companies.

Seriously though, doesn't Sony own the rights now that they bought Psygnosis?

From what I understand 'bona vacantia' only applies if IP wasn't transferred to another owner before the initial owner ceased to exist.

I do recall reading somewhere that the rights to the Discworld games are 50% back with the creators (the other 50% weirdly having reverted into the british crown(!) due to some odd UK law), so maybe if that whole situation get sorted there's a better chance of it getting a re-release.

Strange, I thought everybody agreed that the rights to all Discwold games now belong to Moist von Lipwig through a tier of shell companies.

Seriously though, doesn't Sony own the rights now that they bought Psygnosis?

From what I understand 'bona vacantia' only applies if IP wasn't transferred to another owner before the initial owner ceased to exist.

Well, according to Gregg Barnett in this PC gamer interview from 2024, half of the rights have reverted back to him, anyways:

 "I don't want to give you a scoop, but a Discworld rerelease may happen," Barnett said when asked if any companies had approached him about the subject. "It's on the cards. It may happen. And then it could advance to new versions of them."

The reason Barnett says "may" rather than "will" comes down to complications regarding who owns the rights to the games in the UK. "It turns out that 50% reverted to me as the creator because the company Perfect Entertainment has been closed for 10 years," he said.

The other half of the rights, meanwhile, belong to... King Charles?

"Whenever something closes in the UK, intellectual property rights revert 50% to the original creator and 50% to the Crown, which is King Charles," Barnett said. "So yes, there have been discussions and something may be happening down the track—a rerelease or a remaster. But it's obviously a complicated process when you're dealing with the Crown."

But you may very well be correct, my knowledge of UK intellectual property rights are very limited...

Regarding the existing trilogy of games, Rhianna Pratchett, who's joint owner of production company Narrativia which controls the multimedia rights to his works, responded:

"We only have rights to the characters, not the games themselves. If we did have the rights, then this would be a whole lot easier. We’re genuinely not sure who does own the rights because studios have been bought and sold over the years, along with IP. Last time we investigated this, they were thought to be with Sony, but that’s never been fully confirmed..."

Hm, so for some time they also thought that the rights belong to Sony, but British law thinks otherwise.