Interplay dead?
 

I'm surprised nobody else has posted about this yet. According to Gamespot, it appears that Interplay may have been shut down. Here's a snippet from the article:

Shocking if it's true, especially as Interplay recently announced a Kingpin sequel and the possibility of a Fallout 3. Any thoughts on this?

umm pretty much everyone has known that interplay has been dead for almost a year now.

Yeah, I know they've been in dire financial straits for a while now and had no games released worth talking about (on the pc anyway). That doesn't mean that news of them finally shutting down isn't worth mentioning though. Especially as they recently got people's hopes up about Fallout 3 finally seeing the light of day.

Another link with info. Got it from firingsquad.com:
http://ragingbull.lycos.com/mboard/b...=IPLY&read=967

They deserve that after turning away from us PC gamers.

Descent 4!

That was unfortunately turned into the game called red faction...

yea when they shutdown one of their best studios ( black isle, which unfortunetly was still releasing 2d games in 2003!), i knew they were heading to the gutter.

Kinda sad to see yet another company mis-managed and driven to extinction. :(
They never did make a sequel to battlechess 4000...

My God... this is terrible news! :(

Anther late 1980's/1990's video game software company takes a dirtnap.

:( :( :( :( :( :( :( :(

We are racing toward a world limited to EA, Activision and Atari cranking out sequels and movie licenses. There are a few bright lights on the horizon, let's hope there is still room for something new in the marketplace.

I just dug into my floppy disk holders and got out the Battlechess 4000 disks.

I installed it and ran it under XP with the VDMS program. IT WORKS!

I'm glad I kept the manual in the manual box so I could find the copy protection
key (have to answer a question about the position of a piece on a certain board)

Somehow I thought it looked better than it does at 640x480, but at least it runs.

The animations when pieces collide are pretty darn funny. Viva la 1992! :D

Wait a min, if the reason volition cant make another fresspace is that interplay owns the right to freespace, and interplay dies... Then Volition can buy the freespace right and make freespace 3!!! yay to interplay's death :drool:

no your a bad bad man:( well @ the yaying of interplays death./.. Havent played freespace so icant comment on that part

i like red faction

( the cheaters in multiplayer are annoying though )

Not all is lost, one of the guys who founded Interplay, Brian Fargo, left back in 2002 and has started a new company called Inxile Entertainment - and they've been working on a new version of The Bard's Tale.
For those that never played it, it's an RPG game and Interplay's 1st published game - through Electronic Arts. 1983/5

http://www.inxile-entertainment.com/index.html

But I would have rather had desect 4 than red faction (wasn't bad, but wasn't great).

Well, since they shutdown black isle studio, interplay doesnt have any good studios backing it up as far as i know. This news is sad in the sense that a big player in the publishing business has gone down and now there are just a dozen left standing, but good in another sense that all the game rights can now be sold. We were not sure about the fate of fallout3, well, now it'll probably be sold off to some other gaming company, whether or not that is good is debateable, but at least we'll know if the game is being made :D

I would be ecstatic if I heard Descent 4 was under consideration or development again.

Maybe if they made a descent movie:bleh:

We all knew it's coming.. Canning near-complete BG3 and Fallout3 was insane. it is sad to see how the company which once was so great can fall quicky with bad CEO. On positive side, now there are possibility of other companies(most likely VU) picking up their IP and make them better use..And now, I imagine the EIDOS is following its footsteps as well....

I'm not really saddened by this news. They haven't done much good lately. Sure, they've published a lot of good games over the years, but so has LucasArts, and they're crappy now too. Now that I think about it, I want LucasArts to follow Interplay's lead. Death to LucasArts!

I don't think you need to worry about the games the devs were developing for Interplay. Unfinished in-house games will probably be sold, and unfinished 3rd party games will probably find a new publisher. Well... hopefully

sniff
 

man, you just brought a tear to my eye. i used to play the bard's tale on my commodore 64. i drew maps to all the dungeons on graph paper. i need to find that game on the 'net, lol. i've already found star control 2 ;).

I don't know what they were thinking when they re-released Freespace 2 for $50 about a month or so ago. With those kinds of decisions and others, no wonder they are going down. In fact I have not bought an Interplay game since Freespace 2 was released the 1st time.

Interplay games that I own-
Stonekeep
Descent 1,2,3
Freespace 1,2
Dungeon Master 2
Then there a bunch of other games that I have bought that came out before Freespace 2, but I can't remember them.

For awhile Interplay were bringing out alot of good games. Then all of the sudden after Freespace 2 there were no more good games.

So, frankly, I won't miss them at all. As far as I am concerned they have been gone since Freespace 2.

How about BG2? Or how about Sacrifice? And Giants? They were all release in year 2000 I remember. After that, this company started going downhill, i think. And yes, I agree that charging 50$ for re-release of Freespace2 was ridiculous. Still, with so many great game in past, I miss this company though.

If you haven't played Freespace then you certainly owe it to yourself to find a copy. The Eula of Freespace2 actually allows it to be distributed amongst friends, so if you can find a 'friend' online you could download it legally. It saddens me that Interplay is gone - they published a lot of games I really enjoyed in the mid to late 90's - but my first thought on hearing about their fall was that FINALLY somebody might make another sequel to Freespace. Here's hoping.

I think this could be a positive development.

It's not that big a loss as all of the programming talent had already left for Troika and Obsidian.

Hopefully this will send a message to the industry that an all console shop is not the way to go and that unpopular decisions (canceling BG3 and FO3) do have repercussions--that PC gamers (the market) aren't as clueless and easy to beguile as the shareholders of Interplay apparently were.

Interplay pissed off it's market to the extent that petitions were signed by an excess of 40,000 people protesting the canceling of Fallout 3--if you've seen their message boards over the past 5 months or so, there is much evidence of the displeasure of their fan base.

When they changed their business model to Console only They really didn't have enough residual programming talent to pull of another hit.

Fallout Brotherhood of Steel (AKA FO:POS) was a pretty crappy game--even if it were a great game, a large segment of their target audience boycotted it out of spite for the canceling of Fallout 3...

I think they were fooled by the relative success of BG: Dark Alliance--but this was a game that people would rent, not buy as it was so short...

I hope that the Industry does learn that they can't F()ck over us PC gamers with impunity from this--that they can't give us half-assed ports, and cancel highly anticipated projects. But I'm afraid they won't learn as these people making the decisions are MBA marketroids without a clue as to the tastes of their market. We are not stupid.

If it takes the death of Interplay to teach them this, so be it.