What exactly would having the publishing rights mean to a regular person?
Would that mean they could sell Mk1 and Mk2 cartridges in large quantities with out it being illegal?

Aside from the potential to make money,screw cartridges, thats cheap shit. The exciting part to me, is that the new owner will have rights to do anything they please with MK1 and 2. Since all the console versions originated from the arcade, this could include altering (improving) the game, like fixing glitches and stuff, making new versions, such as legal play of arcade roms and higher quality online play. You would also have access to all information of how the games were programmed I believe, making it possible to finally solve all rumors and secrets in games. Would it be like owning the game as well as the manuscript and information on how it was made?

I hope someone with excellent programming skills gets the rights, that way we may see an upgraded Mk1 or Mk2 about.

Here's what I'm thinking...

If you buy the publishing rights to MK1 and 2... you will have the publishing rights to the SNES versions.... which you could in turn resell to / license to Nintendo for their Revolution "virtual console" download service, and make a pretty penny.

Publishing rights would not mean you could edit the game legally.

And also, Acclaim had the right to publish these games, that doesn't mean Nintendo doesn't have the right to publish without Acclaim. There is pretty much no chance of selling a Nintendo product back to Nintendo.

Ouwa! I was hoping to see "Ultimate Mk2!"



"It's Here! Ultimate Mortal Kombat 2!
More characters, More special moves, Ultimate times the images... and with a few new suprises!" *Sub-Zero does his Mk2 Spine Rip*

why is everyone talking about nintendo? "The rights to Nascar are up for sale" COOL, now I can make go carts! lol.

Mk Karts? EDIT: Oh wait, I've got a better joke; "Well that is what cartridges are for!"

There is no way in hell Nintendo can publish these games all on their own. It is NOT a Nintendo product in any way, shape, or form. Think of it this way, Billy Joel released an album on Sony's MiniDisc format. Does Sony own the publishing rights just because the album was released on MiniDisc? Fuck no. Billy Joel paid Sony to release on MiniDisc through a licensing agreement. Similarly, by your logic, the DVD Consortium would own the publishing rights to every movie that ever appeared on DVD. That is just not true.

Nintendo carts are a hell of a lot more proprietary then a DVD. Thats why game manufacturers pay licensing fees to make games for systems (along with paying for SDKs for the systems usually) and anybody can make a DVD.

Note that the rights for "Mortal Kombat 1 & 2," which I believe was a GameBoy title, were also up for sale. These rights are for specific, Acclaim-produced console versions of the games in question, which wouldn't really be useful for programming anything new even if we were allowed to reverse-engineer things.

The Revolution idea is interesting though. Obviously both Midway and Nintendo would have to be involved in the tranaction, but I assume the holder of the publishing rights would make some sort of money from that. But with things like MAT 2 already available on GameCube, such a venture would probably be considered more trouble than it's worth. Also I'm not sure if all that old legal trouble with the MK2 actors still has a bearing on anything.