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Five That Fell
Ground Glass writes "The games industry is as cutthroat as any in entertainment or tech, and it so happens that many loved, respected, and influential companies nevertheless get crushed in the waves of hardware transitions or left behind by market forces. Given that one of those shifts is rapidly approaching, now is as good a time as any to look at five such companies that are no longer with us, but are still remembered and revered by their fans."
Hate the article format hit "Print Preview".
First Post, also.
+5, Truth
Infocom
:)
Sir-Tech
Guess I'm a bit old school
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
Atari
origin
serria on line
black isle
looking glass
there I just saved you from having to trudge through a horribly formated article. (ad impressions ftw). We really should be linking to the multi-page spanning articles. Link to the printer friendly or not at all.
I missed playing the Wing Commander series, especially dealing with Manic, who came in it own as our own hated Biff from Back to Future Series in the 3rd series. Gotta love watching the videos of watching him getting slapped.
-- Amazing how the Internet still humms along.... -- Dispite all the flaws of Micro$oft in their software!
All those companies lost to EAssimilation:
Maxis...
Westwood Studios...
Mythic Entertainment...
ect...
*cries*
Demented But Determined.
Atari
Origin
Sierra
Black Isle
Looking Glass Studios
rooooar
This game was my favorite Sierra title, although they merely published it.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
You want to know a great way to get me to stop reading your article right away?
Include a banner ad that makes a lot of annoying noises that appear without warning and are deafeningly loud, especially through headphones. Of course, simply causing physical pain for your readers is never a good stopping point, so why not add insult to injury by giving no way to turn the damn ad off?
And then all the bad formatting. . . great job, guys.
Am I the only one was does not immediately recognize 3/5s of these companies?
Haiku for you!
Infocom. The flag-bearer of text-adventure gaming. Brought us dozens of hits like the Zork trilogy, Enchanter trilogy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, etc, etc. You didn't need the latest and the greatest GPU to play those games. There are still indie text-adventures but the genre practically died with the company. Oh I just miss those days. Reading "You are likely to be eaten by a grue" sent more chills up my spine than seeing the most grotesque creature from (insert latest FPS using latest cutting edge 3D engine here) at maximum settings.
My favorite games were the SCUMM games from LucasArts. Now all they make are StarWars games, nothing original like Sam and Max, Full Throttle or any of my other faviorate games.
Link is to page 1 of 7?
"Next Generation" is a good name for the site anyway.
If you have not heard of them you are either very young, not a pc gamer or a filthy console user. Frankly there is no excuse for any of this and you should kill yourselve to atone for your sins.
To be fair, I just started to realise how fucking old you have to be to actually have played Sierra games when Sierra was still going strong. You may be shocked to have never heard of them, I am in shock because I played each and every game mentioned. I am feeling my age.
And as for them being mostly PC companies, well this is payback for the countless articles we get about top ten greatest games ever that forget to mention "consoles only".
Oh well, Looking Glass you will be missed, I bought your games, pity nobody else did.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Like every market where money is to be made, it condenses down to a few global players.
Time warp back to the 80s. The game market was fractured, many, many small companies puttering along, some creating great games, some creating mediocre games, and even the odd gem surfacing every now and then made by a handful of freaks. The market was small, there wasn't a lot of money in it, and thus everyone took the share they could. There were EA (yeah, they already existed. But back then they actually even made games), Accolade, Bullfrog, all of them were more or less "small" businesses.
Snap back to today. The game market exploded, literally. Games ain't anymore something for the geeks in an age range of about 12 to about 18, it's gone mainstream. It's become everyone's pastime, age independent. As soon as a market appears to actually generate revenue, money is being pumped in. As soon as money is blown into a market, small companies are hoovered up in the process by the companies that let the money flood in.
That's pretty much what happened.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Man, I miss those. Or almost, I still haven't solved "Trinity" or "Bueracracy", even though I bought them in 1989 on my way to University with my PCjr... :) Best way to improve performance: copy the whole game to a RAM disk so that the interpreter didn't have to constantly read from the floppy drive.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Article seems to focus on companies that were players in late 90s on. Microprose made many classics: Xcom series, Master of Magic, Master of Orion, Railroad tycoon, and many others.
I started with nothing and have most of it left.
Still my favorite game ever. Damn that was fun.
No one bothers with a good plot anymore or much with internal consistency, it's all graphics and 'kill the evil' type stuff.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Bungie.
I'm still pissed at microsoft for having the insight/monopolistic impulse to buy them. They put out some great titles, Pathways into Darkness, Marathon, and of course Halo, originally demoed in the late 90s on a powermac.
So what happened to the game code? Was the code bought by other companies or did it simply become orphan code?
Has anyone ever attempted to get some of these games publicly released so they could be ported to current systems?
If the code is gone, what a f*ucking waste!
...was painful until you figured out how to get money (negative deposits, anyone?)
My particular bete noire was Spellbreaker. Oy, the cubes!
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
If you put untold developer hours into a game to make it The Awesomest Game Ever, you're going to fall into a lot of traps, but the biggest trap of all is the cost of all of those developer hours; unless your game is an unmitigated hit, you're never going to make that money back.
Remember Novalogic? They haven't had an honest-to-goodness hit since that voxel helicopter game back in the early 90's. And they're still around because they understand this basic principle: Ship the game when you know that it's good enough to generate enough sales to cover your costs, and not one day later. As long as your staff is marginally competent and decently paid, you can always meet that goal.
Origin never saw a deadline they couldn't miss. They, Sierra and Black Isle were increasing their budgets, only to essentially remake the same games that people had played a decade before. Atari failed because most of their games were crap, and the bad games typically had as big or bigger budgets than the good ones. (Remember the horrible Indiana Jones and Return of the Jedi games?)
The only real tragedy in this list is Looking Glass, who was killed off because Eidos would rather divert funds to help Daikatana limp along -- Eidos failing to recognize the common sense of NovaLogic. (In the end, John Romero really did make us his bitch, by denying us more great Thief games.) But at least there's BioShock to look forward to, so this story is not yet over.
But in the end, your game's budget should be less than your expected revenue for said game. If you don't expect the game to sell more than 20,000 full-price copies, you should plan the project -- marketing, development, everything -- starting from that point.
Infocom did more with text inside of five years than the entire first person shooter genre has done in its lifetime.
My personal favorite was "Suspended." You were in a cryogenic state, only able to interact with remote robots to bring a group of out-of-whack computers into working shape again. Each robot had its own abilities and senses -- they rolled or walked, one could smell, and so on. The puzzles made you work at them, and this was one game where the packaging and manual and so on really helped and were necessary. I remember the laminated map vividly. It was the complete package.
The gaming industry should be looking to people like those Infocom writers and Dani Bunten as its prophets. Instead we get John Carmack opinion in nauseating detail about the latest graphic cards.
(Dang kids! Get off my lawn!)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Soulblighter is still extremely fun, still playable and respectable after all these years.
I remember the press releases when Bungie sold out. Eck.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Warren and Seamus left Looking Glass long before it shut down. Doug was still there though, although I seem to recall he was already part-time on Deus Ex down in Austin.
And Eidos didn't shut down Looking Glass. They were a publisher that happened to publish the Thief series. Debt shut down LG.
Lets see:
Dynamix
Papyrus
Epyx (If you are old-school, you will recognize that one)
Black Isle is a bummer. As is Origin. I remember a few years ago, there was a GLUT of space flight sims, trying to take the throne from Wing Commander... and since then, there has not been one that has done it right. I wish that we could get a good sequel to Wing Commander. Better yet, a good sequel to Wing Commander: Privateer.
SSI - Strategic Simulations, Inc.
Simply a must have on a gamer's list. /salute
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Use a software to block the ads. I had no problems with Adblock with FilterSet.G in Mozilla v1.7.13 in Windows and Linux. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
After Midway retreated from the arcades in 2001, Atari Games found itself focusing exclusively on home releases. Apparently those didn't sell well enough, as on one cold day in February 2003, all of the studio's employees were, without warning, led off premises as the building was locked behind them - much to their collective confusion and dismay. It was not until later that employees were allowed to return for their personal effects. Thus ended the 31-year history of Atari - save the endless Midway compilations that place Atari Games productions front and center, as the shining gems of Midway's history.
They never let me go back and collect my personal belongings after escorting me out.
Seriously though, very sad. My 800XL still isn't the same since I told it it's parents had died.
Least they got in on a UT title.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
Six that Sucked
Now wait a minute. You were just saying that game companies should keep sinking money into a project until it's good and now you're complaining about a company that followed that logic. You aren't making sense. Really what it boils down to is you liked Looking Glass, but you hate John Romero and Eidos because they didn't support Looking Glass when their games weren't selling.
Maybe it was Looking Glass that needed to learn a lesson from Novalogic. Maybe Looking Glass spent too much money on games that only appealed to a niche audience.
San Fransisco
Spelling.
San Francisco BTW.
[UID-HeinzIntel]
I loved Kings Quest, Heroes Quest, and Space Quest. I loved (to this day I can play any of these with my eyes closed) the Wing Commander series, Privateer!! I love Fallout 1&2 I must be getting old, as this list of people actually made me feel a bit sad. Sigh.
Another one that closed up shop recently was Working Designs. They made some gems from Cadash, Parasol Stars, and Vasteel on the tg16 all the way up to Growlanser Generations on the ps2. The best game they ever did was Lunar.
I'm with the rest of you old farts. I didn't play all of these, but I definitely remember them. This explains quite a bit that occured and I was unaware of at the time. Rather mysterious how you'd be expecting a sequel and it never happened, or worse, a sequel came out, it was done by another company and it was nothing like the original (in a bad way).
If I could Mod the article, I'd give it +5 for insight.
I'm personally pleased to see my favorite company and games mentioned throughout the article. I knew Origin was often a leader in game technology and typically pushed the envelope forcing you to upgrade your PC every time they published a new title, but I had no idea their influence linked to other studios and spread so far.
I played (and finished) every single Ultima game except Underworld. I played the demo, I own a copy of it but I never finished it. It has been on my to do list for 10 years now. :-)
What's truly disheartening is the end result of all the mentioned companies and the other dozens like them. The capitalist, have-to-make-a-dollar methodology of software companies now is deplorable and leaves no room for developers to experiment and come up with something really creative. It's a vicious cycle driven by the almighty dollar - deadlines and templates != creativity and productivity.
Another several great examples of how EA has ruined everything they touch.
Nowadays I guess we should consider ourselves happy as long as federal stooges don't break down our doors and carry our children off to Gitmo.