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Atari Shuts Down Legend Entertainment?
MachDelta writes "Yet another talented PC game studio has closed their doors today. Shacknews is reporting that Legend Entertainment, most commonly known for their work on Wheel of Time, Unreal 2, and Unreal 2: XMP, has been shut down by Atari. Though nothing official has been announced by either Legend or Atari, insider reports have confirmed that the sad news is indeed true. Losing Black Isle was hard enough, but now Legend? It raises the question: Who's next?" Update: 01/18 04:34 GMT by S : ShackNews has a messageboard post by Legend designer Glen Dahlgren seeming to confirm the closure.
I owned UR2 and remember how much pain it took to finish that game with all the crashiness it had using a specific SB soundcard. The gameplay was great, albeit short and annoying when it blew up.
To be honest, I never thought that Legend was really that great. "Wheel of Time" was interesting and good looking, but nothing to really go nuts about. "Unreal 2" was another - nice, but not supreme.
This sounds more like capitalistic market forces working than (in Interplay's case) Point Haired Bosses making silly decisions.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
The studios are really about the people. Their names mean nothing without the very people that started them. In most cases when these studios are shut down, the personalities that were important in leading them already left. For example, how important is BullFrog when most of its key developers and founder leave to form another studio? What's Origin without Richard Garriot or Black Isle without Ferquant (or whatever his name was)? The bottomline is that's it's really mainly the people that matter. The studios / their names mainly just serve as a marketing vehicle. Unless these developers / designers die - great games will still come from them - just in the form of a different brand / studio.
Before they ever did Wheel of Time, they were an adventure game house. Steve Meretzky was one of the great names, and came there from Infocom IIRC.
Their first games were basically text games dragged into the 90s kicking and screaming, by letting you play using both verb/object bars, or just typing in your commands like usual. Small still images and BGM tracks constituted the technical advances.
That might sound bad, but the games were good, especially the later ones. The asthetic essentials of descriptive text and vibrant environments were never left out.
I think Legend's two main problems were:
1. It got stuck in FPS games after WOT was a success. Its core strength, after all, was originally in adventures.
2. It got sucked into the folds of a large game company. When a developer reaches that position, it seems like death is inevitable.