Twin Galaxies tweets about this post floating the possibility of Kickstarting a revival of Blood, the Build-engine first-person shooter released by Monolith in 1997 (thanks Janic). Monolith Founder Jace Hall, who has been working with Twin Galaxies for a while now, is polling interest in such a project. The first hurdle standing in the way of such a revival would be untangling the rights to the IP, and Jace outlines where they stand before mysteriously saying they are still somewhat of a puzzle. Here's a bit that covers that and his pitch:

For those that don't know, Blood is a first-person shooter video game developed by a company I founded called Monolith Productions and published by GT Interactive Software. The shareware version was released for the PC on March 5, 1997, while the full version was released on May 31, 1997 in North America, and June 20, 1997 in Europe.

Many feel that Blood was easily the best of the three major Build engine games, voicing the opinion that Blood was "one of the most underrated shooters of the whole decade” and that “Blood took its gameplay to sophisticated new heights and offered referential overtones with an even greater degree of refinement (than other similar games of the period.)"

For this feeling and opinion to last nearly 20 years through generations of gamers is a fantastic testament to the talent of everyone who was involved with bringing the game into existence.

So anyway, I started to wonder if perhaps there might be enough interest out there in seeing this truly revived?

Perhaps its multiplayer BLOODBATH could even evolve to an eSport! ;)

Maybe someone should start a crowd funding campaign to gauge and prove interest?

You see, Monolith sold the publishing rights for Blood and its sequel to GT Interactive. GTI was later acquired by Infogrames, which has since been renamed to Atari. Over the last 15 years, Atari has been divided, bought, sold and reconfigured numerous times. Monolith itself was acquired by Warner Bros. Entertainment, which now theoretically owns the Blood trademark and intellectual property.

But the truth is that the rights status and the entire history are a bit complex and basically there are around 3 people on Earth who truly understand that complexity, none of which are currently at Atari or WB.

Since it is my name and signature that is on all the Blood related contracts and deals - assuming a large enough crowd funding effort, I know I could help move the needle on this. But do enough people care?