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Court Returns Stolen Stargate MMO To Founder
An anonymous reader writes "A Maricopa County Superior Court judge has ended a bitter dispute over control of a Mesa video game company's assets, effectively giving the online combat game Stargate Resistance and the long-delayed MMORPG Stargate Worlds back to Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment. Fresh Start tried to remove all of Cheyenne Mountain's assets from its offices on Feb. 24, but was prevented from doing so when the police arrived. Networking cords had been cut and left to hang loose, and PC cases were empty shells that had been gutted of components such as hard drives. But time may finally have run out for Worlds, Cheyenne Mountain's signature project: The ruling comes as MGM Studios has apparently terminated the license it granted in 2006 for the Arizona company to produce video games based on the Stargate movies and TV shows."
My friend will be very sad today.
They simply claimed that the gutted computers had all been upgraded to Vista. To the casual observer there is very little difference between an empty case and a computer running Vista.
Monstar L
At first I thought the court had returned a stolen Stargate, not a stolen Stargate *MMO*. Which would have been much bigger news, that's for sure.
I am officially gone from
Not sure what Fresh Start Software's motive was, but if it was to block development of a Stargate videogame, they achieved their goal.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
My first thought: What could the Founders possibly have to do with a Stargate?
Then the parsing agent caught up. What a disappointment.
Star Trek was awesome in its day. Some will say that it still is. But what it had was not just a vision of the future, but a hope for the future. Star Wars gave us a new way look at things as well, but I can't say that it offered much more than intense entertainment. Stargate sought to engage the mind by tying old mysteries with new ones creating a galaxy and even a universe of awe and wonder that continued to expand beyond limits that were not imagined previously. Very few other sci-fi themes contained the qualities contained within Star Trek, Star Wars, Battle Star Galactica, Firefly and others, but Stargate, while it did seem to run its course, maintained those qualities in intense amounts. Had greed, politics and myopia had not taken its destructive toll, the potential of Stargate could have set a new standard for the genre.
I mourn the loss... but it was lost long ago. We're just seeing the aftermath of some really crappy people.
It might have been a lawsuit about a real stargate and the control software for it, disguised as a game that will never finish.
First, I'd never heard of somebody so literally stealing intellectual property.
Second, why is it that whenever I read of a flagrant disregard of the basic protocols of human interaction and the law, it seems to involve the phrase, "Maricopa County".
Finally, "they left the network cords to hang" (spins up and Hulks out): "WHAT KIND OF A MAN LYNCHES AN ETHERNET CABLE!"
Breaking in, stealing components, gutting computers. Who's the CEO over? Joe Arpaio's little brother?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
They won a court decision and got something from someone else. Is there a limit on the number of characters in their keyboard? Is it too much trouble to even research the story to find out what is going on? It is like watching the last 5 minutes of "Iron Man" and going WTF? Who is the good guy, Stark because he won, or because he blows up stuff?
This is why I hate to read the article, I am hoping some /. poster is going to do the work of posting the back history. The thing the "journalist" did not do.
I was in the early alpha and beta testing of Worlds, as I had a friend at Cheyenne Mountain. It was the first MMO I actually liked. It was a little buggy, but the game was almost done when bankruptcy hit. This was complicated by some freeze being put on the accounts where, even though the money was there, they were not able to pay their employees. Shoot, the game was in Beta, there were just a few bugs to work out, the server farms were going online - the game was pretty much READY - and the inside word was that they were weeks (about two months) from going live. Quite sad what became of it.
Yes, Star Trek brought to us a vision of the future wherein no matter where one roams in the universe, 1) Everybody looks human, 2) Everybody speaks perfect English, despite never having been contacted before by humans, and 3) Sex with alien species is considered perfectly natural. All I can say is... Ewwwwwwwww!
Oh come on.
To be fair, Star Wars, BattleStar Galactica, Firefly, Babylon 5, Dr. Who, Space: 1999, and a host of other shows all featured those characteristics.
It's not because the shows' makers were unimaginative, it's because they are television shows.
It's difficult to find actors who don't look like humans; audiences in the countries where these shows were produced mainly understand only English (there are no native Klingon speakers, no matter how many nerds learn the Klingon language); and sex keeps stupid people watching the show, helping the ratings. Ok, Dr. Who hasn't featured much, if any, sex, but that's because it was a BBC production aimed at families.
Putting moderation advice in your
I was really looking forward to trying out the Stargate MMO.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
Though I'm not sure what a Changeling wants with an MMO anyway when they have half the galaxy to play with.
Oh wait, wrong "Star" series...
Forget that old plagaristic Stargate MMO lame-ass-ity - Fringeworthy MMO FTW!!!
It's coming bi'ches!!
Seriously though a free MMO where Gates lead to new persistent server worlds - where user content servers are allowed - and could even contain parallel universes or lead back/forward in time - THAT is the future WoW Killer!
(and hardcore role-players could opt-in to allowing characters to permanently die - and worlds permanently change - based on real player actions)
I say - Make it So!
I was gone by then, but based on what I know of the people who started it, Fresh Start's goal was to continue supporting a game they believed in. While still at Cheyenne, they completed and released Resistance quickly under terrible circumstances (circumstances that I fled), only to be betrayed by Gary Whiting with a bankruptcy filing the instant they brought the company its first revenue ever. Then they managed to form a company to continue supporting the game. They kept the servers up and even released new maps and improved some of the graphics assets.
This article is 100% Mr. Whiting's side of the story. While at Cheyenne I formed the opinion that he is a very shady individual, but I was pretty low on the totem pole, so I don't know what was really going on.
What I know for sure, however, is that Resistance would never have come out without the people behind Fresh Start, and it probably would have been completely unsupported from the moment of release (possibly unplayable, with the servers down) without the formation of Fresh Start. So I'm going to give them a pretty fucking big benefit of the doubt.
Oh, and based on the financial situation when I left, the people working for Fresh Start were probably getting paid next to nothing, if that much. So obviously "stealing" pays big time.
I would just like to see SG-1 or Atlantis back on air..
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
TFA uses 'it' so many times between 3 companies I have no idea what's going on. It sounds like a kindergarten argument over possession of a sandbox - where the sandbox is assets and IP.
The cut network cords were simply where the server racks were removed. They weren't actually cut, just pulled out of punch down blocks. The reason for the apparent gutting was because the landlord was going to lock the company out of the building, so Dark Comet was trying to save as many assets before that happened. There wasn't enough space for all the computers, so the hard drives were taken to prevent the data from being misused by whomever the landlord brought in to sell off the equipment. Everything was done with permission from the receiver, and event when the cops were called was resolved in favor of the people with the equipment because it wasn't company property. There is a general lack of correct information about what happened with Cheyenne and Dark Comet, but overall the intentions were to save the games and not destroy them. The primary reason Dark Comet is giving back the assets is they ran out of money.
I always liked Space: Above and Beyond. The aliens were humanoid, but not human. They didn't speak english, in fact, they didn't understand each other at all. It wasn't a soap opera either.
I would have liked to see that one end instead of just getting canned on a cliff hanger (sort of a cliff hanger, really just more of a REALLY bad day for everyone.)
+1 informative
Yeah I'd steal too if I wasn't getting paid for my work.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall