As was the case with Monday’s news that Duke Nukem would be pulled (temporarily) from GOG, it’s been found out that Interplay’s Descent series has shared the same fate, this time due to a royalty dispute between the game’s rights-holder Parallax software and Interplay. A forum post explains the problem in detail:

Parallax Software still exists and still owns the copyrights to the Descent games. Under our 21-year-old agreement, Interplay has the exclusive rights to sell Descent and Descent II, and they have been doing so on Good Old Games and Steam.

The problem is that Interplay has not paid to Parallax any royalties since 2007. We’ve talked to them about this numerous times over the years, and finally took action this fall. We served Interplay official notice that they were in breach of the contract, and when they still failed to pay we terminated the agreement.

This means that Interplay has lost the right to sell the Descent games, which is why they came down from GOG. (We’re not sure why they’re still on Steam; they shouldn’t be.)

Interplay does, however, still own the Descent trademark, which they are free to use or license as they see fit (such as for Descent: Underground) as long as they don’t violate our copyrights.

As for whether Descent and Descent II will be available for purchase again, we hope so. We’d be very happy to work things out with Interplay.

This highlights on of the biggest problems with digging these classic games up and re-selling them; you have to keep all of the different parties involved in the game’s long publishing history happy with a cut of the profits. Remember too that this once happened with Fallout as well, which resulted in a temporary sales halt of the Interplay-owned titles in the series.