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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."
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.
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.
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.