You can now buy the rights to Dragon’s Lair and other retro gaming classics for $20k on an eBay-style platform hawking old game IPs

Fancy owning a piece of true retro-gaming history? Don’t we all, but if you have 20 grand lying around in a draw somewhere you could soon be the owner of the rights to Dragon’s Lair – Don Bluth’s historic arcade title from back in 1983.

As with all life, it isn’t quite as simple as that as the rights to the game only encompass the Super NES,  Mega Drive / Genesis, NES, and Game Boy versions to do with as you please. You can even develop new games using the IP, as long as it is on one of those four machines – perhaps not as ridiculous as it sounds, people are still making games for the Genesis and the Amiga as we speak.

The items, including Dragon’s Lair, are all available on a new system called Elite Systems Auction and it has been created by Steve Wilcox – founder of prominent 1980s and 90s publisher Elite Systems.

Elite was one of my favorite publishers back in the day with games for home computers such as Frank Bruno’s Boxing (much played on my beloved Amstrad CPC) and arcade conversions such as Space Harrier and Ikari Warriors

Now Wilcox has said, in an interview with Time Extension, that the service enabling IP holders of classic games to sell them via an eBay-style system, known as Elite Systems Auction, has long been an ambition of his.

The kicker is that the auction bit doesn’t work right now, IPs are just there as fixed prices and at the moment entirely are ones owned by Elite.

It’s a rather niche idea but it is interesting to see the value Elite still puts on things such as the Dragon’s Lair license. $20k is serious company money and would be unlikely to see much of a return on investment with just those four retro consoles to go at.

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