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Interplay Finally In Process Of Going Under?
Random Guru 42 writes "GameSpot is reporting that Interplay is sliding further down the spiral of going out of business. Hopefully the rumors of Interplay's demise are greatly exaggerated." We previously covered earlier rumblings of Interplay's demise, and Sivar writes "According to a Fallout news website, Interplay has 'told the employees to file for unemployment' [a later source indicates 'the employees have until Friday to move all of their personal possessions out of... the Interplay offices]." Finally, an update to the GameSpot story has an un-named, masked employee insisting on the closure rumors: "No, that's not true" - it's also pointed out Interplay "...is facing a battery of lawsuits, including one by Arden Realty for $432,000 in back rent and another by BioWare for $156,000 for unpaid Baldur's Gate royalties."
If they are being sued for such relatively small sums, particularly for unpaid rent, it's highly doubtful the rumors are off by much.
...and fade into the wasteland. Bet they're wishing they'd found that waterchip, eh?
Seriously, sad to see Interplay go, but they've made some dumb decisions. Losing Feagus and his team was probably close to the final blow.
"Life's funny sometimes." "And sometimes it isn't." --Cat's Cradle
A shame. Interplay have been arround for longer then some slashdotters have been alive, and certainly longer then many have been on the internet. List of games interplay have published
As I said last Interplay post, Interplay is going under because they abandoned Descent, the best shooter game ever ;)
While that probably isn't true, I'm going to stay hold of that belief as I'm in the Descent religion.
the Political Inquirer
Generally when a gaming house goes into recievership, the game franchises they own go up for sale, the proceeds going to the creditors to pay all that backrent.
So for all you Descent/Freespace fans, there's a chance that somebody decent (are there still decent game houses now?) will pick it up and make it gold again in a year or so.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
"Hopefully the rumors of Interplay's demise are greatly exaggerated."
.. Well, at least on the bright side, now we have Obsidian and Troika out there (founded by ex-members of Black Isle)..
Hopefully ? I'm hoping they do go under permanently. While I certainly feel bad for those who stayed with the company and have to deal with this now (which the exception of Caen, I have no sympathy for him), Interplay's been going downhill for years. Their tech support has to be the worst I've ever encountered (especially when they stopped replying to any of it two years ago), their "quality control" is completely non-existent.
For that matter, I can't think of a single good game they've released since Baldur's Gate 2. And, to me, the worst part was their decision to axe Fallout 3 (and Black Isle Studios for that matter) and instead pushed out the utterly worthless Fallout: BoS.
Time to order anything I wanted out of their back catalog before they go under and those titles are unavailable and near impossible to find.
For example, I've attempted to modify the Tourneyfest to support AI players. It seemed to work find, but I quickly ran into problems with the AI players. In no particular order:
1. No matter which team I assign to the AIs, they always appear as Federation. There are ways to make sure that they are one of the other six factions, but it is not considered as dynamic as it could be. (tMissionInfo::mSetTeamRace sets the race for a team, but does not change the race for such a team after it has been created. You can't change it directly either, mainly because the team is stored in a Private section of the class.)
2. When you create a ship, you are neither returned a handle to the newly created ship, nor can you determine the existance of that ship without iterating through the entire list (assuming that it is possible.)
3. The documentation that came with the API was fairly poor - requiring the programmer to do a lot of guesswork of whcih functions did which.
The gameplay portion isn't bad - however, if you peek at the gory insides of the game itself, you'll begin to wonder how it managed to hold itself together.
Interplay failed three times to pay the employees. Forgot for about two months to tell them they weren`t covered by medical, dental and insurance plans anymore, then restarted paying for those plans then stoped again.
They stoped paying rent and the owner of their rented space went to litigation. They stoped paying Atari for the D&D rights for eletronic gaming media,wich meant they lost the right to sell most of their backcatalogue, and Vivendi refuses to pay them anything else on Baldurs Gate: Darl Alliance3 until that`s settled, wich doesn`t seem likely. The crappy fallout game for consoles was an expensive sales failure. After Fallout3 they had already canceled two projects, and were working in just one, that was having some troubles because of yet again legal troubles.
So they told the devs and artists to go pick their personal belongings, while removing things during the long weekend. They are saying to the employees to go and ask for unemployement, in a bid to see if they won`t have to pay them what they owe.
They had 1.2 million dollars in the bank late December, and no one knows what happened to that.
The CEO told everyone last week he needed 3 million to pay salaries, rent and taxes, since they also owe money to the irs.
Good luck for the devs and artists, no matter how good many of them are in the context of the gaming industry in CA things aren`t good for getting jobs, i hope they get what they are intitled from Iplay and find better jobs.