Slashdot Mirror
Bethesda Sues Interplay Over Fallout License, MMO Plans
Bethesda Softworks has filed a complaint with the District Court of Maryland to forbid Interplay from selling older Fallout titles. The complaint alleges that Interplay failed to hold up its end of an agreement that required it to submit marketing and packaging details to Bethesda for approval. In addition to that, Interplay was supposed to initiate full-scale development of a Fallout MMO by April, 2009, gathering at least $30 million in funding to work on the game. "If Bethesda prevails, Interplay would lose the rights to develop the Fallout MMO. There is little to show for the progress of the Fallout MMO in public venues, although many speculate that a mysterious title called Project V13 is in fact the Fallout MMO."
Interplay had little or nothing to do with the "legacy". Black Isle designed and wrote the both of the games you mentioned, Interplay just published them. Yes, Interplay owned the IP rights, but it doesn't mean they had some special attachment to them that no one could replace.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
With Fallout 3 if you run the launcher it performs the disk check before running the game. If you directly run fallout3.exe it will directly start the game without the launch which would require you to select that yes you do actually want to run the game, and you won't have a disk check either.
Black Isle was owned by Interplay. I think you're confusing them with Bioware.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
Black Isle was Interplay's internal RPG developer division. They were never a third party.