Questions about the owner of the No One Lives Forever rights are making the rounds on the internet. Activision blogger Dan "One of Swords" Amrich tried to find out if Activision owns the rights, but can up with nothing.
The rights would have been part of the Activision/Vivendi merger, but it now appears as if Activision don't have the rights - and neither does developer Monolith (now owned by Warner Bros.).
"The person that I normally talk to about this stuff does not believe that we currently have the rights. They've never seen it, they've never been given the permission to put that stuff on Good Old Games. They said basically, 'If we had it, I would love to have been able to reissue those games.'"
"I wondered if maybe at the time when Activision was saying 'We'll keep these, we'll leave this, we'll sell these,' whatever, maybe Monolith stepped up and took their IP back. So I contacted a friend at Monolith and he doesn't know. So unfortunately all I can definitively say is that at this time I do not believe Activision has the rights to No One Lives Forever."
It should be noted that several Vivendi owned IPs were sold off at the time of the merger to the highest bidder and it is entirely possible No One Lives Forever was among those. Then again whoever owns the rights should make the old games available as soon as possible - you're losing money by the minute, or well, hour, or at least by the day.