Limited Run Games' CEO Josh Fairhurst has personally obtained the rights to several old FMV games, originally created by the Night Trap developer Digital Pictures.
The news was shared on September 5th, with William Mesa, the founder of Flash Film Works (the Visual Effects company that bought the rights to many of Digital Pictures' games following the studio's closure in 1996) making this announcement public across various social media channels, such as LinkedIn and Twitter/X.
"I have a major announcement to give you," Mesa wrote online. "Over the last five years we have been working with programmer Tyler Hogle, Josh Fairhurst and Limited Run Games to release some of the video games that I have owned for many years. Now I have sold all the games to Josh Fairhurst personally.
"In the deal I have given him all the rights to all of the games but I have kept all motion picture, television, streaming and digital rights to the titles. I am in the process of developing Corpse Killer and Maximum Surge. I have also developed a short, loosely based on Maximum Surge. Which I will get into on a later post."
According to Mesa, the deal includes the following nine titles, which were originally released or created by Digital Pictures: Double Switch, Corpse Killer, Kids On Site, Prize Fighter, Quarterback Attack, Supreme Warrior, Slam City With Scottie Pippin, Maximum Surge, and What's The Story?
As you may be aware, in the past, Limited Run Games have already rereleased digital versions of three of these for a selection of modern consoles (Double Switch, Corpse Killer, Kids On Site), but it seems like we could potentially also be seeing the rest getting a release in one way or another in the not-so-distant future too.
Out of all of these, perhaps the most interesting to us would be Prize Fighter and Maximum Surge. Prize Fighter is an FMV boxing game that released for the Sega CD/Mega-CD and featured black & white graphics that were compared rather generously at the time to Scorsese's 1980 classic, Raging Bull.
Maximum Surge, on the other hand, was an unreleased title, that starred Walter Koenig and Yasmine Bleeth, and featured special effects from Flash Film Works. It was supposed to launch in 1996 for CD-based platforms including the 3DO, Sega Saturn, Mac, and PC, but was never finished at the time, with footage later being cobbled together with other Digital Pictures' games to make the movie 2003 Game Over.