After the last episode I probably shouldn't care, but I do...

[A Black Falcon]

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/06/01/...99678.html

Interplay dead? Maybe.

It looks bad, certainly. I noticed some time ago that their website was stripped down -- their forums were killed, after being there for years -- and then a couple of weeks ago it went down completely... and stayed that way. And now rumors are coming that it's being shut down. And because of the name and the history, I care. This well might be false, but either way it shows what state they are in now and it's very, very sad.

[alien space marine]

I bought quite alot of interplay games , its a shame .

If they are in Irvine , They must live next to Blizzard were I have actually been too.

[A Black Falcon]

I think Irvine's a good sized city, so they don't necessarially have offices near eachother... though it's possible...

Really, the situation with Interplay could barely be any worse even if they do still exist. They have many bills and little cash. They are making only a few games and if many (any?) of those do badly they probably fold. Their overall game quality is down (they've always made some bad games, but they used to make good games too...). They have been threatened with eviction from their headquarters for not paying rent. And then their website loses some of its best features (forums, downloadable soundtracks, etc) and then completely vanishes. Is it any wonder that people wonder if they still exist?

*added*

Hey, it's an update to the story!

[UPDATE] Early Wednesday, the voicemail system at Titus' American offices ceased to function. An early follow-up call to Interplay's offices got an actual person on the line for the first time in over a month. When asked if Interplay was going out of business, the person said, "No, that's not true," but refused to elaborate. When asked if she was an employee of Interplay, the person said, "I'd rather not say," and promptly transferred the call to Herve Caen's personal mailbox. Caen had not responded to the voicemail as of press time, and several subsequent calls to Interplay's main line were met with a busy signal. As of 1pm Wednesday, the line was still busy.

Umm... that is weird.

[alien space marine]

Irvine has a huge private business sector , For companies trying to be left alone and anonymous. You would never know it was Blizzard HQ untill you walked inside , Everything is unmarked , You couldnt find the place without the full address or you would be lost.

[A Black Falcon]

More developments. Fines for not paying their employees for weeks. Loss of health insurance. Possible eviction from their offices this week for months of unpaid back rent. What an awful situation... very sad for a once-great publisher. :(

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/06/04/...99957.html

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/06/04/...00019.html

[Smoke]

So does this mean Stonekeep 2 has been cancelled?

[A Black Falcon]

After how incredible the first one was, wouldn't that be a national tragedy?

I do have Stonekeep, actually. It's one of the numerous games in that Interplay 15th Anniversary Collection (15 good-to-great Interplay games for $15-20! I got it five years ago (that'd have been their 15th anniversary, right? I think this year was their 20th... all they did was do a limited online re-release of Freespace 2...), and it was worth it. Sure there are plenty of not great games in it, but it's got Conquest of the New World, Norse by Norsewest, Fallout, Castles II (I loved the first Castles... Castles II is very different, and probably not as good (though it's more a LOTR-style game than a focused castle building game), but still great to have...)... Shattered Steel, Descent... several others too.).

I only played Stonekeep a little, but it seemed like a very average old-styled dungeon hack. With extremely simplistic combat (okay, I didn't get far enough to get multiple party members or magic. But early on it seems to consist just of ' how fast can i click to hit them and will I die first or those stupid goblins'... stupid goblins, they killed me like three times then I quit playing...), node-based movement, and FMV! It didn't seem terrible, but it doesn't exactly stand out as one of the great RPGs. Or even one of the great Interplay RPGs. But I think you know that. :)

[Smoke]

It's a sad yet somehow just day.

[Smoke]

I actually got Stonekeep when it was new. It had a cool hologram of a skeleton on the cover. But then it took forever to figure out how to get the thing to run on our computer. Had to tweak some memory management settings. Fun game but not great. There actaully was going to be a Stonekeep 2 but it was canned.

[A Black Falcon]

So was I missing something to the combat, or are you just supposed to avoid all of the places with 3 goblins until you get a lot stronger?

[A Black Falcon]

http://gameboy.ign.com/articles/522/522101p1.html

Well after getting insurance and paying employees they reopened... but Titus, their parent company, filed for bankruptcy. And if not for their grip over the shell that remains of Interplay I'd say 'I wish you closed' to stupid Titus... not just this, but I don't exactly think of Titus making many games worth even considering. :D

[Smoke]

Don't forget Superman 64!

[A Black Falcon]

OH yeah! ... and it's main competition for worst N64 game? Interplay's Carmageddon 64. :D

... on that note, the two Movie Gallery stores in town are selling off their N64 games. One of them has FIVE copies of Carmageddon 64... :)

[Dark Jaguar]

Don't forget Quest 64 and Castlevania 64. Second version of the latter was improved enough to be "eh, it's fun enough for a rental", so it's out of the running.

[A Black Falcon]

Castlevania was just mediocre-to-poor, a relatively common category, not truly abysmal like Superman and Carmageddon... not quite the same class. :)

Quest? I haven't played or seen it (of course I haven't played Superman or Carmageddon either... but those reviews were even more obviously 'this is amazingly bad in every possible way'...), but the reviews sure weren't good... Darunia will disagree with you though. :D

[Great Rumbler]

Quest wasn't really all that bad it was just overly simplistic with few redeming qualities.

[A Black Falcon]

Not exactly a game worth paying money for, though, I think. :)

[Great Rumbler]

Well, not worth paying VERY MUCH for.

I sold my copy to this kid in my class for like $40. Bwahahaha!!

[A Black Falcon]

That's not too smart on his behalf. :)

[Great Rumbler]

And I sold it to him right before he moved away. :)

[A Black Falcon]

http://www.homelanfed.com/news/redirect....allout.com

More fun for Interplay -- employees suing for not being paid since April.

[A Black Falcon]

http://money.cnn.com/2004/06/21/technolo.../index.htm

Different company, but similar line... Vivendi. 350 people canned. This includes the May closings of Papyrus (NASCAR sims) and Impressions (Lords of the Realm, Caesar)... the new closings are in more casual games divisions -- the Hoyle line is gone now. Oh, and the last Sierra office still operating, in Belleview, Washington, is closing. With Papyrus, Impressions, and the last Sierra office gone I think we can truly say that Sierra is utterly gone. ("But what about that new Liesure Suit Larry game?", you ask... well, what about it? It's just using an old name on a new game... not even in the same genre as the old ones and I don't exactly think that this will spark some kind of rennaisance in "Sierra" (which now has about as much right to its name as "Atari", I think)...) I know that this all started five and a half years ago, but it's just as sad now as it is then. Especially when it involves the recent deaths of great developers like Papyrus (the best truly hardcore sim racing game developer there was) and Impressions (great strategy game developer...). :(

[Great Rumbler]

Sierra was a great developer back in the day...

[A Black Falcon]

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/chil...01282.html

Like with Black Isle, but on a lesser scale, Impressions spun off a developer before its death... it's from some guys behind the City Building Series. This is the result -- Immortal Cities: Children of the Nile, a new Impressions-ish City Building game. It looks cool and makes some interesting changes to the old Caesar III formula (that was copied in Pharoah, Zeus, and (the externally developed Chinese-setting city building game published by Sierra) Emperor...), like now houses send people out -- they don't wait for those walkers to come by. Also it's 3d. Looks interesting if you like games like this...

I'd wish that the Lords team also spun something off, but after Lords 2 in '96 they declined... Lords of Magic wasn't that great, IMO, and Lords III is a very different product.

[A Black Falcon]

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2004/06/25/...01470.html

Caen sure talks big... now he's talking about a Fallout MMORPG. If it actually happens it could be great, but after the mass exodus of the good talent from Interplay, the major financial problems, and all that, I don't think the chances of it getting to the point where we can worry about how good the remaining Interplay people are at making games are are very high, unfortunately...

I don't get it. Caen comes in from Titus after buying the company. He prefers console to PC games so they cut back drastically on PC development. He kills off Black Isle and their two great looking RPGs because of some idiotic reasons and lets all of Black Isle's talent worth mentioning get away. But he talks optimistically about the future of Interplay all the time, no matter what new low the news about the company is... and then this? After destroying BG3 and Fallout 3? I don't know what to think, really... I think Interplay would be better off without Herve Caen, certainly. But... if after making so much effort to turn off the fans of Interplay's once-great lineup of PC RPGs, why is he moving back into that market? It's kind of strange.


I do know one thing, though.

http://biz.yahoo.com/rc/040625/media_interplay_1.html

Interplay will run out of funding if they can't come up with a bunch of cash, and that doesn't seem all that likely. The most likely thing is Interplay folding sometime in the not too far off future.

[A Black Falcon]

Gamespot.

Tribes: Vengeance producer exits

Chris "Thrax" Mahnken has left the Tribes: Vengeance development team just a few weeks before the game's slated release. Mahnken's departure from the team working on the title, published by VU Games, comes on the heels of massive layoffs by the company. Mahnken posted the following message on the Tribal War Web site: "Just a few short weeks before Tribes will hit the shelves my time has run out. I was given a 90-day extension to stay on at Sierra (the building has been nearly empty for a month now) and finish Tribes. We're now in a great position, ready to ship, and I'm confident that the team in Australia will do a fantastic job finishing the game. It's been a pleasure. I'm tired. I need a rest. As a member of Sierra and the Tribes development team, good-bye."

Tribes: Vengeance is the latest installment in the multiplayer action series for the PC. It is scheduled for release on October 12.

The last employees of what was left of Sierra are gone... :(

... been playing Quest for Glory III and King's Quest VII in the last couple of weeks (with KQV and QFGIV and V waiting...) so I really know what is gone. But as I said in some thread more recently most of the gaming companies I remember as great PC developers from the mid '90s are gone or unrecognizable now... between Sierra, Lucasarts and Interplay I had a lot of my favorite games, not to mention missed developers like all of the Sierra sub-divisions (Impressions, Dynamix, and Papyrus especially), Bullfrog, Westwood, and Origin, Looking Glass, Sir-Tech, Microprose, 3D0 (New World Computing), Accolade (made some good sports games)... so sad...

... just the mention of 'Microprose' makes me want to play Civilization II... maybe I will...

[Smoke]

Gamespot.


The last employees of what was left of Sierra are gone... :(

... been playing Quest for Glory III and King's Quest VII in the last couple of weeks (with KQV and QFGIV and V waiting...) so I really know what is gone. But as I said in some thread more recently most of the gaming companies I remember as great PC developers from the mid '90s are gone or unrecognizable now... between Sierra, Lucasarts and Interplay I had a lot of my favorite games, not to mention missed developers like all of the Sierra sub-divisions (Impressions, Dynamix, and Papyrus especially), Bullfrog, Westwood, and Origin, Looking Glass, Sir-Tech, Microprose, 3D0 (New World Computing), Accolade (made some good sports games)... so sad...

... just the mention of 'Microprose' makes me want to play Civilization II... maybe I will...

Just read this post while going through some old threads and the only thing that came to mind was this: All my heros are dead.

[A Black Falcon]

Depressing, isn't it... they're all either dead or the living dead... and need to be shot repeatedly like a zombie should be. (Lucasarts, Sierra, and Interplay, I'm looking at you!)

We could add Troika to that list now too, though it was only around for six years... pathetic isn't it, Troika is gone but Interplay's corpse still won't die... let's hope those guys (from Troika) go on to make more good things. After all, they ARE the core of the Fallout 1 team...

[Dark Jaguar]

Through all this, one question comes to mind. Where do adventurers in video games put all that stuff they carry around?

[Smoke]

I think we all know the answer to that question but nobody wants to admit it.

[A Black Falcon]

In RPGs, they use backpacks... invisible backpacks, but backpacks. :)

In adventure games? Who knows, usually... :D

[Great Rumbler]

In Monkey Island 3, Guybrush just stuffed all of the things he collected into his pants.

[A Black Falcon]

That was pretty funny, yeah... :)