I think the obvious is being missed, at the end of the day I think it's not all that difficult to sort out the problems if the people involved really want to. The problem is that old IPs like "No One Lives Forever" have an indirect value that companies do not want to give up. It comes down to high end IP trolling, a lot of which is handled behind the scenes by lawyers out of the public's eye. The more IPs a company has the easier it becomes to both try and shave pieces off of someone else's work, as well as establish precedent to defend your own work if someone tries to do it to you. If say someone accuses you of ripping off their 3rd Person Space Marine Shooter, the more IPs you have that are in some way similar to what you released and were unchallenged allows you to say "it was based off of these things". Similar to having the rights to old engines where you can claim an innovation came by building off of an engine you own, as opposed to stealing from someone else. Perhaps more relevantly to something like "No One Lives Forever" is that it was a well done, but ultimately fairly generic game, that plays in a common sense fashion for the genera. Those who hold that IP are thus in a position to try and shave pieces off of anyone else who tries to make a spy game, especially one set in the 1960s using old spy movie/TV series tropes. There were rumors that the whole reason why the "Alpha Protocol" franchise failed was that once development was started the publishers started getting challenges specifically off of this IP due to vague similarities, enough where it slowed development, and involved the modification of certain game systems, the game came out late, buggy, over budget, and with enough potential baggage that nobody was in a hurry to try again, and allegedly this is why what should be a popular genera has not seen anyone else making an effort to revive it. There were also rumors about WoTC which owns TSR's "Top Secret" RPG license wanting to do video games based off of it (ORION Vs. WEB) and giving up for similar reasons. This could all be untrue mind you, I get all this from rumors, speculation, and some pretty old discussions, but the bottom line is that old style 60s spy stuff is popular and pretty much everyone who wants to mess with it winds up being inspired by things like "The Man From UNCLE" or even "Get Smart" (which was parodying the 60s spy genera before Austin Powers was remotely conceived of). The thing is that video game IPs can be odd which is why so much defense is needed and why Tim Langdell even tried his form of copyright infringement, because at the high end unless your holding a lot of cards to defend yourself, someone can make broad claims to an IP. Using acronyms like say HARM and the like which invoke images of SPECTRE and CHAOS and others can ridiculously enough lead to people claiming anyone who wasn't as quick to rip off the 60s spy series either can't work with the IP or owes them money. What's more given time everything comes back around, whomever has the "No One Lives Forever" rights is probably sitting on them, waiting to bring out that bit of precedent to try and exclusively develop within the genera when it becomes a serious fad again... not well articulated, but there are my thoughts based on how I've heard about how the games industry operates, and that with video games it's much easier in a lot of cases to make IP claims with broad strokes than with other media.
