I have thought about not covering copyright or Trademark ownership discussions on this blog anymore. It tends to create a lot of drama every time and it just makes me tired. However, we need to talk about this.
Last year we learned that Rebellion Games had acquired the entire catalog creatred by Flying Buffalo Games. Flying Buffalo were founded in 1975 by Rick Loomis. When Rick sadly passed away back in August 2019, the company briefly passed to Webbed Sphere (Jason Kingsley OBE) who sold the Flying Buffalo games catalog to Rebellion.
Based in their press releases at the time, Rebellion seemed to be most focused on Tunnels and Trolls. However, another part of their press release may be of particular interest to readers of this blog:
"As part of the acquisition Rebellion have taken over Flying Buffalo’s entire line of roleplaying games, including the cult classic Citybook, Grimtooth, and Merchants Spies and Private Eyes series. The entire back-catalogue of Flying Buffalo PDFs will remain available to purchase online, with future releases coming directly from Rebellion Unplugged. "
Now, we know that Dave Arneson contributed to a couple of gaming books linked to some of these series. In 1984, he contributed to City Book II: Port o' Call. For Merchants Spies and Private Eyes, Dave Arneson wrote the adventure The Case of the Pacific Clipper (1991).
At one point Dave Arneson told me that he had sold his company Adventure Games to Rick Loomis. Adventure Games also made several games whose current ownership is unknown to me. When I asked Rick about the status of Adventures in Fantasy, which is one of the games Adventure Games produced, he was not able to confirm that story at the time.
Find out more about Blackmoor Week here?
-Havard
