If a company silently shuts down, what happens to their assets and legal status?

Question

Edit: By assets, I mean actual game assets, like art and music, not legal assets

I’m working on a fan game / remaster of a dead game called “Deepworld” that was developed by a... well... also dead company “Bytebin” (I don’t know if they went into bankruptcy or not, they just lost their contact information, developers all shutdown social media, company websites are mostly down, the company phone number doesn’t work. However, they were running out of money (hence the reason they had to shutdown Deepworld’s servers, so bankruptcy is the most likely reason the company went dark))

I want to know, if a company just silently shuts down, and it’s disbanded / bankrupted, what happens to the game they developed, and the assets they created? What is the legal status of those assets

I ask this because I want to recreate the game using the original assets, and I would rather not get into legal trouble over it

Answer 1

In this answer, I mean "assets" in the legal sense of "property that has value". This includes intellectual property, such as the copyright to the game's computer code, art, music, etc.

Bankruptcy generally happens when a company cannot pay its debts, and is a legal process by which its assets are distributed to its creditors. So if the company went bankrupt in this sense, then some of those creditors likely now own the copyrights that interest you. Or, they may have been sold to some third party and the proceeds given to the creditors. Either way, someone owns them, though it may be hard for you to find out who it is; but that someone could sue you if you infringe their copyright.

If the company didn't go bankrupt but simply decided to stop operating, its assets could have been distributed to the company's owners or shareholders; or, as before, sold off to whoever would buy them. Again, someone still owns those copyrights, and could sue you for infringement.

There is basically no way that a company's shutdown can lead to its intellectual property losing copyright protection. That happens only if the company voluntarily chooses to release those works into the public domain, which is equivalent from a financial perspective to throwing them in the trash. If the company is in financial trouble, throwing away valuable assets is the least likely thing for it to do.

So, the short answer is that the fact that the company shut down does not give you any right to use their intellectual property in your own game. If you want those rights, you'll have to negotiate with the current copyright holder, whoever that may be.