Yeah, pretty much the only person I know who has done "legit repros" was Brandon over at Super Fighter Team. He got the rights for several titles from the original developers and translated, romhacked and then released the games.
He's got a bit of a mixed track record as to release times, but I give him props for pulling off a release that keeps the original rights holders/developers in mind as well.
That's really very cool that he was able to accomplish that. As a collector myself, I've also thought about how nice it would be to own some nice pretty reproductions to sit on a shelf and occasionally glance at, but I've never taken a bite out of that sandwich for the reason that I'd be purchasing something that wasn't legitimate and therefore only contain the value of the beholder and how much it was worth to them personally (or subsequently how much it was worth to the Repro shop to sell it by creating a demand for it). I just see it as overpaying for something that isn't real and doesn't support the original copyright holders and/or the translation teams that worked on it.
But in a case like what xelement5x describes above with Brandon from Super Fighter Team, I think i would be totally behind an operation like this.
True Puffer, I'm not sure if you are trolling or not as it does seem like you haven't made too many friends here with your posts so far, but I'll assume that you are being serious about finding a real solution for collectors, translators and copyright holders alike. Reading on what you've stated so far, to really do this correctly so that all parties involved are happy and compensated, an entity "We are the next Working Designs" publisher would need to be established.
This of course would be of no small feat to accomplish, because even if you were to have all the crowdfunding money in the world, there is no guarantee that that money will A) allow you to purchase a legal license to sell the game B) bind you to any actual release schedule or contract for releasing the game (a.k.a. they might take the money and run and call it a failed project, just like so many other Kickstarter projects that fail after they get funded).
To become such an entity, you would first need your own money and influence and probably a track history of being a successful publisher yourself, or at the very least a person with a lot of connections who knows who to contact to make things happen. I would wager that most Japanese businesses would not care to deal with an entity that has no proven track record or relies on crowdfunding as the only means of funding a localization project, even if it is for old / dead software. They would probably just not even be interested in appeasing a handful of collectors.
But, all negativity aside, I would honestly love to see something like this happen actually, if it really could be done correctly. A rise of a new publishing entity geared toward releasing physical retro-games and unreleased localizations of software, perhaps only in limited quantity. With the publisher's blessing as well as the team working on bringing the translation forward being able to work with this entity to secure the rights and release their projects as new official releases. This could actually be a positive news story for the developer as well: "Developer's game gets new release in the United States after 20 years!" and other developers / copyright holders might want a piece of that action once it became popular / trendy enough.
I guess I would kind of envision it as a similar concept to how IndieBox does it for indie games today.
But if you ask me, I don't think we are quite there yet. There still needs to be a successful publishing entity out there willing to make that kind of bold move first, and that all takes capital and likely a huge loss, before any real profit or breaking even is met. Ultimately it is a bit of a gamble. It may even be more of a risk than releasing the RetroVGS in this day and age.
-Thomas
