[Dais]

http://wii.ign.com/articles/101/1016511p1.html

blah blah metroid blah blah retro blah blah fellatio blah blah wait what

http://wii.ign.com/articles/101/1016511p4.html

As the months passed, Retro readied the E3 demo of Metroid Prime -- a playable 10 or 15-minute tour of the space station that precedes Talon IV -- and one that would soon blow journalists away and silence skeptics. Publicly, E3 seemed a major turning point for the developer: playable proof that it had the stuff to make software of a caliber typically reserved for Nintendo itself and few other GameCube suppliers. But behind closed doors, the roller-coaster ride was far from over. The critical acclaim and positive reaction from the fanbase might've saved the studio from an untimely demise. Had the E3 demo of Metroid proved disastrous, I'm inclined to believe that Nintendo would've simply swooped in and cut its losses. As it stood, even amidst a huge E3 showing, Retro was faced with more employee layoffs and cancelled projects. A football game it had been prototyping got shelved. So did a Twisted Metal clone tentatively dubbed Car Combat (or Thunder Rally). And then there was Raven Blade, the last of the non-Metroid projects, which made an impression amongst fans for its stylized visuals, promising story and alleged role-playing mechanics. That got the axe, too, and more employees -- nearly all of them disgruntled -- fled the studio flinging gossip and insults in their wake.

]"I always like reading the posts about Raven Blade. There's this underground mystery about that game. When you start reading the blogs and newsgroups and what have you, there's always this post that says, 'Oh, they're going to work on Raven Blade' or 'I wonder if they're bringing Raven Blade back?' And at one point I went back and had them burn the last copy of Raven Blade -- and this was probably two or three years ago -- and I looked at it," says Michael Kelbaugh, president of Retro Studios. He's a straight shooter who possesses the managerial skills so lacking from Retro in previous years and he's also a collector of fine vodka. "I just couldn't believe that we even came close to making anything like that because it was absolutely horrible." Like I said, he's a straight shooter and frankly, I'm a forced to agree. I caught an early glimpse of Raven Blade gameplay footage years back and it was uninspired and underdeveloped. Had I not known better, I would've never pegged it from the same studio behind Prime.

background:
http://cube.ign.com/objects/016/016579_articles.html
http://cube.ign.com/articles/096/096922p1.html

here is my question: who owned Raven Blade? It was apparently Nintendo's decision to order the project canceled, and Retro's decision to have it....uh, destroyed.....but who had the, you know, rights? Since it never got into any kind of finished state, let alone published?

[Carnivol]

No idea, really, but it always sounded to me like as if Raven Blade was Retro's "thing", but Nintendo was probably financing and/or publishing. (Maybe with some sort of exclusive rights? Thus making them somehow able to "pull the plug" on the project and tell them they'd rather have them deliver something else for the money...)