[nolok]

Vivendi Games (owned by Vivendi Universal, the huge french conglomerate) bought them (they also owned Blizzard, amongst others), then VG merged with Activision and were in majority control, then Vivendi (parent company) decided they wanted out of the gaming business to focus on other ares (one being telecoms) and sold their shares to Activision, making a nice profit.

In what is one of the most Vivendi "we don't know what we want to do" event, just a couple years later they then decided they wanted to sell their main french telecom company (SFR) and at the same time bought Gameloft and agressively bought Ubisoft shares (the two biggest french video games companies).

[mschuster91]

So right now Activision should be the rightsholder?

Too bad. I highly doubt Activision will ever release them. I tried to contact a bunch of companies via email, regarding the source code for EarthSiege 2, but never got a reply :(

If anyone knows anyone who worked on ES2 and might shed a light on some weird things I encountered during reverse engineering, please contact me!

[cdr]

It's also worth pointing out that the Gameloft acquisition was very much a hostile takeover. Gameloft and Ubisoft were both founded by the Guillemot family, and the Guillemots basically washed their hands of Gameloft after they failed to stop the takeover and dug in extra hard against Vivendi at Ubisoft.