Why is Warner Bros. opposed to releasing its classic games?

[Leviathan]

We're seeing a whole bunch of old licensed games getting released. TMNT, Nickelodeon, Disney, Marvel, etc.

One big exception is that there haven't been any collections of games based on Warner Bros.-owned properties. And there's a ton of them.

I guess I can understand why a Tiny Toons or Animainiacs collection would be a problem. Amblin co-owns those shows and you'd have to get them to the table and pay them. But Sunsoft made a bunch of Looney Tunes, DC Comics and Scooby Doo games where that's not an issue and were not even seeing those. There's also the Taito Hanna-Barbera games, the Infrogames (now Atari-owned) Looney Tunes and Wacky Races games for the Dreamcast and PS1, and even a couple of arcade games (Road Runner and Batman) WB owns outright since they were Atari Games/Tengen.

It's just baffling to me where even Disney sees more value in letting classic games with their properties get rereleased than WB.

 

[John Pannozzi]

I can't imagine Amblin would step in the way of the Tiny Toons and Animaniacs games getting re-released. We were still getting the odd new game based on those games in the 2000s, not to mention they have been some random merchandise based on them recently from companies like Kidrobot, Funko and Super7.

It makes shudder to look for positives in the pending Paramount Skydance/WB Discovery merger, but since we're getting collections of Nickelodeon-related games currently, maybe WB's new owners will be interested in licensing their new toys to folks like Limited Run Games.

 

[Classic Speedy]

It might be a case where WB doesn't even know what they have. This is not uncommon with these corporations that have large amounts of IP. Do you really think whoever's in charge of all this knows there were some video games made of Looney Tunes back in the '90s? Even if they were aware, why would they care? They have all these new properties to work on. And this is different than restoring their classic LT shorts for preservation purposes- they had next to nothing to do with the creation of the games in the first place, other than licensing the characters to the publishers/developers.

A long way to say, I bet if Limited Run or Digital Eclipse approached them with an idea for a collection, they'd be like "Sure, go for it."

 

[John Pannozzi]

It might be a case where WB doesn't even know what they have. This is not uncommon with these corporations that have large amounts of IP. Do you really think whoever's in charge of all this knows there were some video games made of Looney Tunes back in the '90s? Even if they were aware, why would they care? They have all these new properties to work on. And this is different than restoring their classic LT shorts for preservation purposes- they had next to nothing to do with the creation of the games in the first place, other than licensing the characters to the publishers/developers.

A long way to say, I bet if Limited Run or Digital Eclipse approached them with an idea for a collection, they'd be like "Sure, go for it."

Limited Run's boss Josh Fairhurst tried for three years to license the Tiny Toons and Animaniacs games from WB and they turned him down:

 

[Classic Speedy]

Oh. Well forget everything I said then.