And now a moment of silence please (part 1).


Role-playing survival game is willing to take risks

Since they’re aren’t a lot of good topics to talk about in the industry right now, I figured I’ll start this segment on some of the worse moments of the industry when a good company or system went under, This entry is on the fall of Interplay.

With my Good Old Games account now working I’ve been playing Sacrifice again, an imaginative well designed strategy title. For gamers like me who like unique original, works InterPlay was one of the best in the 90s. Titles like EarthWorm Jim, MDK, Giants, and many more were amazing. Without InterPlay there would be no Baldur’s Gate, which means no Fallout. You could attribute a lot of their success to the various game studios under their belt.

The two big sources of income from Interplay came from Shiny Entertainment and Black Isle Studios. Shiny produced a number of unique titles (some I mentioned above) and you could always count on a great (weird) time with one of their games. Black Isle was the RPG maker and worked along with Bioware to create Baldur’s Gate, giving us the RPGS I’ve mentioned above, and the ill fated Lion Heart which would be their final game. Since then Black Isle has closed and they tried making games under Troika Studios but went under. I believe Shiny is still around but the spirit of the studio lives on at Planet Moon studios. So what happened to Interplay?

They met with severe financial troubles, as unique games unfortunately aren’t often huge sellers. They were bought by Titus and then Titus went under, and since then a lot of financial problems happened. According to Wikipedia Interplay is still around thanks to the money earned for leasing the Fallout license to Bethesda and will make sequels to their popular titles. However there has been no information about this at all, and I haven’t heard anything from Interplay in a long time.I really do find it unsettling that unique IPs always seem to fall by the wayside while the umpteenth FPS or sports title rakes in the big bucks. At this point in time who can say if Interplay will be able to turn it around, but sadly the Interplay of the 90s is long gone.

Josh (who still wants a Sacrifice 2 dammit)