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Interplay On Verge Of Bankruptcy?
EvilDonut writes "According to Gamesindustry.biz, long-time publisher Interplay is facing possible bankruptcy. Apparently, the company is three months behind in rent, owes almost $280,000 in a mix of outstanding payroll taxes and non-payment penalties for those taxes, and failed to meet its payroll obligations in the middle of this month. Heavy stuff." The piece also notes that, following "the asset-stripping antics of parent company Titus", the company has "lost the rights to publish Baldur's Gate 3 and other future D&D properties, and it may lose the right to continue publishing its Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance titles if it cannot settle a lawsuit from Atari which accuses it of failing to pay royalties on the D&D license." We've previously covered Black Isle's de facto demise, another key part of Interplay's woes.
From what I understand, Interplay is also currently in breach of a settlement agreement with Warner under which it owes the media giant some $0.32 million - and having entered into a payment plan to rectify this, is now also in default of that plan.
This is what happens when a publisher publishes bad games and scraps good games for even worse games. Case in point: Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. If they had not tried to convert to a console-only publisher, and focused on what they did well: fund good games (Fallout, Baldur's Gate, Descent, Planescape) instead of crap games (Brotherhood of Steel, Hunter: The Reckoning...) they might not be in the ditch they are today.
Let it be a lesson to the other publishers.. when you publish crap, you go to crap.
Is Interplay making their final Descent?
If a company can't continue to publish new titles based on one of its own self-developed intellectual assets, you know its just about done.
I worked for Interplay back in it's hey-day (late 97-late 98). They had so much going for them. Lucrative deal with Shiny, the D&D license, Fallout, BG, Carmageddon. There were 400+ employees across three buildings.
Then there was the whole going public thing, and some really bad development choices. They split up all the devlopment teams into "studios" Which is where Black Isle came from. They scrapped some pretty big projects that already had 2 years dev time into them (Stonekeep 2 jumps to mind), and started releasing extremely dated material (Descent to Undermountain). I was lucky enough to leave before the first big round of layoffs.
Last I heard, the company was down to about 40 employees or so, and from this it sounds like they won't be around much longer. Hopefully someone will get in there and buy the remaining licenses they have with any sort of value.
If it had not been for Descent, where would Interplay be today? They might still be here, they might not. All I know is that they were good with some kick arse games like Descent and Descent II, but when they published a crap game like Descent 3, well, yeah. Descent 3 was a halfway decent game but it lacked Descent-ness, if I may call it that.
Did Interplay even publish Freespace and Freespace 2? I never played Freespace 2, but I was a Freespace fan and it was a good game too.
If Interplay wants to save themselves, they need to talk someone into, namely Volition or whatever the other split of Parallax software was, to try and develop a good Descent IV and maybe another Freespace game? Those were great, and I think that's the entire reason Interplay ever became as well-known as they are.
the Political Inquirer