A small group of loyal King’s Quest fans have been toiling away on a fan-made sequel to the classic adventure series for eight years. Eight years! At one point, Vivendi, the IP rights holder, got all uppity and made an attempt to shut the project down, but an agreement was reached that allowed the team to continue working on the project. Known as “The Silver Lining”, the team hoped to release the game, for free of course, at some point in 2010.
Unfortunately, Activision recently came into possession of the King’s Quest IP and are now acting like big, throbbing dicks. That’s a technical term, look it up. Activision has demanded that all materials relating to King’s Quest be removed from The Silver Lining Website, in effect destroying eight years of dedication and labor…and for what? They weren’t going to make any money from this project. The Silver Lining was made for fans by fans. No threat whatsoever to Activision’s license.
A sad turn of events that makes Activision the Darth Vader of the gaming industry, at least until the next corporate snafu comes along and pisses me off.
In 2005, Phoenix Online Studios received a Cease & Desist letter from Vivendi Universal, the owners of the King’s Quest IP, in regards to our work on The Silver Lining. We complied with the request, and over the months that followed, we were able to work out a non-commercial fan license with Vivendi that allowed us to continue our work on the game.
We have spent a lot of time recently reworking the material of The Silver Lining into episodic releases, with the first out of a planned five episodes completed, and submitted for review, and had hoped we would be able to bring our game to you, the fans, in the Spring of 2010.
Recently, however, ownership of the Sierra IP changed hands and became the property of Activision. After talks and negotiations in the last few months between ourselves and Activision, they have reached the decision that they are not interested in granting a non-commercial license to The Silver Lining, and have asked that we cease production and take down all related materials on our website.
As before, we must and will comply with this decision, as much as we may wish we could do otherwise.
We cannot say enough how much we appreciate the support we have had over these years from our fans. Without you, we would never have gotten this far. There would be no game to develop, and no one to develop it for. You have been amazing and steadfast, and we will always remember that and appreciate it more than we can say.
Sadly, after eight years of dedicated work and even more dedicated fans, The Silver Lining project is closing down.
What the future holds for us, as individuals or a team, we cannot say. We have an amazing development team, however, filled with talented and hard-working individuals, and we hope the teamwork and rapport we’ve developed won’t go to waste. We hope that when we do know what the future holds for us, our fans will be there to enjoy what we can give them still.
Again, thank you all so much for everything. This has been a long and crazy road, full of more twists than we could’ve anticipated, but more triumphs and wonderful memories than we could’ve ever hoped for. And for that, to all of you and to everyone on our team, we will always be grateful.
Nostalgia (no, not the DS game) is tons of fun. Learning more about products or popular culture that you can only marginally remember from your childhood is sometimes addicting, which is why I am so fond of the Angry Video Game Nerd and his retro showcases on old gaming systems that I never got to experience.
Well, SNK Playmore is having a retro console celebration of its own at the moment because it is the 20th anniversary of the Neo Geo home gaming system. Does anyone remember that thing? No, probably not.
Neo Geo was a rather ingenious arcade cabinet system that allowed owners to swap out multiple game cartridges within the same cabinet – an unusual but highly space-saving feature at the time. Whereas most arcades were “dedicated,” meaning they could only play one game, Neo Geo arcades could play up to six different games. Anyone who visited an amusement center or bowling alley during the early ’90s will likely recall the Neo Geo cabinets that allowed you to select different titles such as World Heroes or Metal Slug, all from the same arcade cabinet.
The arcade system was known as the MVS, or Multiple Video System, but there was also an AES, or Advanced Entertainment System, which was the home console. The AES was prohibitively expensive as it cost more than twice what a new Super NES would drain from your wallet, and the cartridges themselves could run over $100.
Despite being around video games my entire life, I have never seen an AES or heard of any person who owns one.
But if, like me, you’d like to take a trip down memory lane (granted, memories that not many of us have) and tour a digital Neo Geo museum, check out SNK’s 20th anniversary celebration going on right now on their website. You’ll find old Neo Geo ads, a history of the platform, and even a blog sharing some memories of the system.
You can’t even say “Comic-Con” without preceding it with “San Diego”. The San Diego Comic-Con has been a yearly phrase ever since 1970, when it first began operations. But, with time comes change, and with success comes competition and this is what San Diego is facing now as several cities are making a big push to host future Comic-Cons.
Anaheim, Las Vegas and Los Angeles are the big three, licking their chops at the fact Comic Con’s San Diego contract expires in 2012.
Hotels near San Diego’s convention center have offered Comic-Con 300,000 square feet of free meeting space and have proposed doubling the number of dedicated convention guest rooms to 14,000 in an attempt to lock in the convention through 2015.
By then, convention center officials hope to have completed a planned expansion that would leave the event with ample space.
“San Diego and Comic-Con go hand in hand like Batman and Robin,” San Diego Convention Center Corp. spokesman Steven Johnson said. “We want to make sure that dynamic duo stays together.”
Comic-Con spokesman David Glanzer acknowledged that the event has been straining against the limits of its current home and that it is considering whether the San Diego proposal would assuage those concerns.
“We love San Diego. The majority of the people who put the show on live here,” said Glanzer, who did not know when a venue would be chosen. “But we have to make a decision that’s based on what really is best for the event.”
A truly dedicated Castlevania fan over at retro fan site The Castlevania Dungeon recently managed to attend the Castlevania Concert in Stockholm, Sweden, and filmed the performance for the rest of us non-Swedish shlubs to see.
Not since the free Super Smash Bros. Melee orchestral CD from Nintendo Power have I been this impressed with a live performance of video game music. As a fairly experienced vampire killer myself, I was able to recognize most every tune played in the videos. But perhaps you’re a newer fan to the series, or maybe you haven’t played the games in a while.
So how about a little test? Without cheating via Google search, can you tell recognize the name of each song and the game it’s pulled from? But don’t think it’s going to be easy, because some songs have been redone multiple times throughout the series, with each version having a distinctive sound. I’ll give you some hints.
Keiichi Matsuda has created a wonderful short film that depicts what our near-future may be like once augmented reality comes of age. With various augmented reality apps hitting the iPhone on a seemingly daily basis, the below video isn’t too much of a stretch. If nothing else, it will be a marketer’s dream come true. For the rest of us, I wonder if we’ll be able to pay a little extra to minimize the blitzkrieg of advertising.
It’s that time of year again. Love is in the air, suicide rates are spiking, and businesses everywhere are lying and trying to take advantage of you. Some companies are spending millions in television advertising to convince you that buying pajamas on the internet will get you laid. Or perhaps the woman you desire will finally surrender to you once she sees that you’ve bought her a teddy bear that cost more than the Prestige Edition of Modern Warfare 2? What about diamonds, or the boxes of chocolates where you only end up getting one or two bites of the one you really like? Maybe a really expensive, super-special arrangement of flowers from that guy with the commercials who gives off the distinct impression he might be considering marriage someday in the state where they make the pricey teddy bears? That’s not likely to do it either.
The brutal truth is that the only people guaranteed to be stimulated this evening are the flower shop owners and Hallmark store managers. Plus, in the opinion of this aging writer, if you’re having to pay for it you’re with the type of chick you might as well try and get the money back from once she’s refilled your health meter. Instead you need to keep your Modern Warfare 2 NVGs turned on and eyes peeled for the type of girl that cares more about a players Mana then his gold. A woman who’ll start an Army of Two with you and always give her all playing Co-op even when you’re wounded and it looks like you won’t have ammo enough to make it to the next save checkpoint.
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