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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."
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
Why, did his cat die?
Yes. Didn't you read the summary: "Networking cords had been cut and left to hang...".
All that cat5... sad, really.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
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.
Love the ironic juxtaposition of your post and sig.
That was footage from this very MMO in the first episode of SGU by the way. They actually wrote something that resembled a game before imploding.
From reading the linked articles it seems like Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment was in Chap 11. Then someone (maybe a group of investors?) illegally sold the assets of the company to the new gaming companies for $100,000. It appears the court said that action was illegal both in terms of procedure and perhaps value as well. The motives are where the real dirt is, and I suspect you're not going to get a straight answer on that until after all the lawsuits are settled.
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
DS9 was based on an earlier script for Babylon 5. You can google the lawsuits but let's put it this way, Paramount lost the lawsuit so badly they had it sealed and were forced to show B5 trailers at Star Trek conventions. If you have any idea how anti anything not paramount those guys are, you know they got pounded flat by the judge.
(The version of B5 they had their hands on even had a shapeshifting security officer... )
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.