Let’s look at the facts, after Interplay went public in 1998 and was completely acquired by French company Titus Interactive in 2001 by none other than Herve Caen following a few rought years, Brian Fargo and the old management left, most of the talent had left, the company was delisted from NASDAQ in 2002 and the remainders of Black Isle Studios were laid off at the end of 2003.
Since then they’ve mainly been in the news because of lawsuits and PR stunts and have barely managed to scrape by through sale of the Fallout franchise to Bethesda.
What they have done since then:
- Cancel a few bad console games like Dark Alliance III and Brotherhood of Steel II
- Sold rights to the Fallout franchise to Bethesda, keeping the rights for an MMO, then cancelling said MMO after long legal battle
- Re-Released Earthworm Jim on WiiWare
- Licensed the rights for Earthworm Jim HD to Gameloft
- Opened an Indie publishing arm called “Interplay Discovery”, releasing “Pinball Yeah!” and “Tommy Tronic”, releasing a few more titles later
- Re-Released a few games for DSiWare (Prehistorik Man and T-Rex Rumble)
- They had somewhat of a hand in the development and release of MDK2 HD by Beamdog, the same guys that are doing BG: EE now…
- They also ported a few games to iPhones and iPads
- The last thing they did is announcing “Battle Chess: Game of Kings”, getting into financial straits, launching a KickStarter to help fund it and fail at that
At some point in 2008 they announced that they “would be back” and their plan of making a Earthworm Jim 4, Descent 4, MDK3 and the Fallout MMO, none of which have materialized.
There’s currently 8 people working for Interplay.
Do you really think they will be able to produce and release games even closely resembling what Black Isle did in its heyday?