Activision Shuts Down Indie King's Quest Sequel
A fan-based non-profit King's Quest project has been extinguished by Activision.
For any old-school PC gamer, the King's Quest series represented one of the cornerstone's to the evolution of the adventure genre. Even though it was a franchise that spawned many sequels, it was one that was eventually left behind as one from yesteryear – but not if the passionate bunch at Phoenix Online Studios have anything to do with it.
Phoenix Online Studios, who was working on a free continuation of the King's Quest series called the Silver Lining, had an agreement since 2005 with Vivendi Universal, the owners of the King's Quest IP, to create an episodic game that was set to be released online this Spring.
With the merging of Activision and Vivendi Universal, the ownership of the King's Quest IP changed hands and now fell to the decision makers at Activision Blizzard. That group must be a different personnel than the ones at Vivendi Universal, as Activision is no longer allowing the continuation of this independently-fueled project.
In a letter on the official site, the Silver Lining Development Team wrote:
February 28th, 2010
To Our Fans:
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.
Thank You,
The Silver Lining Development Team
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"Big Greed" at it again
No much appreciation for community support for old titles anymore. It's all about the money now.
They would be better off creating a new game with a similar style and storyline.
Just another reason to not buy Activision anymore... As if MW2 wasn't enough for me.
Either way, the guys making the game should change the title, modify the artwork a bit, and change the character names a little and release the game any way.
I am seriously in disbelief. This is a REAL outrage. ARE YOU KIDDING ME!!!!!!!!!!! I corny, 20 year old game, snuffed out. For a NON COMMERCIAL LICENSE? The only word that comes to mind is, "SCUMBAGS".
This sucks for sure. However it shouldn't really be a surprise. There's no such thing as a publicly traded company that does anything other than try to make money for themselves. You don't make money by letting someone else give your stuff away.
Just another reason to not buy Activision anymore... As if MW2 wasn't enough for me.
What's the deal with mw2? I thought it was an ok game, did I miss some kind of scandal?
King's Quest! That goes back quite a few years. RIP
Pretty crappy. I don't see how what essentially amounts to fan fiction would infringe on anything. If they had the balls and ignored Activision's letters and threats, they'd probably avoid any legal trouble. What Activision is doing is pretty crappy though. They're just creating bad press for themselves by shutting down a fan game for an IP that hasn't had a new game in 10 years or a good game in 15 years. It's a dead franchise. The original creators have zero plans of returning to it, and they support fan projects. At worst, Activision would get free publicity and renewed interest in a forgotten franchise, and maybe release a compilation like Vivendi did. It's just a dumb move by them all around.
Activision said it best in one of their either quarterly or annual reviews. "We will not pursue IP that cannot be 'exploited' on a yearly basis." So in other words, for all of your good old rehashed same old S%&*, buy Activision. To see what they do to products just look at World of Warcraft. How long did it take the first expansion to come out? Then very quickly the next expansion came out, and it was buggy as hell. Exploited is the exact wording that was used too. I'm not making that up. You would never see World of Warcraft Soda before Activision bought up Blizzard. What gets me is why don't they work out a contract to sell the damn game? There are many fans of classic adventure games that were watching this very closely. Now I will never have a chance to play it, let alone buy a copy of it. This is Activision showing how stupid they can truly be.
@kelemvor4: the non-dedicated server system.
Once again activision kills a game with which they have done nothing with. Is their new tactic to buy old games and then stop anyone from making sequels?
They honestly are not thinking about their customers.
I honestly have not bought any games in the last 5 years from activision with the exception of Quake 4. That was because I justified it by it being only 9.99 AND would run on Linux.
BTW, if they were doing something with it, then I may have a different outlook.
So, tell me again why? It's not like this would cut into profits ANY, being a spin off of a long-since out of print game...
FU Activision, just another reason why I will never buy your games. You and the Vivendi scum simply acquire IP and sit on it.
I liked KQ III the most.
biggest disappointment of the year so far
I hate Activsion more than any other game company out there especially now that they block a game 8 years in the making, ready for release and approved by previous management. I hope Blizzard can find some way to break off like Bungie did with Microsoft.
So Phoenix Online Studios has an agreement for five years, works on this project during that time, and then when they are about to release it, Activision executives (I imagine they speak in a petulant Peter Griffin voice: "No! That's *our* intellectual property now. You can't have it!") yank out the proverbial rug from under them. Well, you can't blame Activision. Douchbaggery, after all, is part of their nature.
I'm beginning to see Activision's logic. If they buy up all the old game licenses and kill them, then people will not be able to spend their video game hours playing free sequels, but instead be forced to purchase new Activision games, and Activision will then be able to cheerfully make/sell crappy games because, hey, what's your alternative?
What a moronic move. 8 years of development, and then they have the rug pulled out from under them just on the cusp of making a release. This is not the Activision I knew growing up. I still can't disassociate that name from Pitfall on my good old 2600.
Bobby Kotick: Gaming's Antichrist?
This is what happens after corporatization. The soul has left the body so to speak.
I don't care whether Activision acted within their rights here or not. They've dealt these fine dedicated people a terrible blow. Shame on them.
After the disaster that was MW2, I think Blizzard should split and get the hell away from Activision.
Lol, what the heck is King's Quest?
Why the hell did they not sign some kind of agreement with the former team? They could have made it so that whatever new IP owner would still be bound by the agreement.
NO WAY!! This game was so cool back then if you typed look behind rock, you would literally go behind the rock and look or at least some form of text would imply that there was nothing behind the rock! There is a new gameboy DS game that is similar to the instruction set but its not an RPG..... This game would have been cool had it been updated with a new system, mechanics, graphics and a story with some nostalgia along with it. I was around 10-13years old when I played this on my parents PC along with Rampage!
This has happened a LOT with Sierra games. Sierra used to be the greatest game company around. I was a huge follower of the Space Quest and King's Quest series. Ever since the company was acquired back in the mid 90's their old franchises have been left to rot and fan-based efforts have been thwarted by lawyers. It's the saddest story in computer gaming.
I grew up on Sierra games.
More reason to hate Blizzard/Activision greedy pigs.
Has anyone considered that they are going to take on the development team or their work and release a commercial product based on their work or perhaps develop the series again in a new form, since they now see that there are fans out there that will support the game, perhaps even if it's not free for the long time fans.
They are too busy figuring out how to release Starcraft 2 in three parts at full price for each one and still make it seem like you are getting a full game each time.
Remember the days when the Activision name meant you were probably getting a good game? Back before Robert Kotick, Mr. "I'm taking the fun out of making games?" When that bastard dies in a fire, maybe it'll be worth buying Activision games again. Until then, screw them.
**** you Activision!
Unless Activision is planning its own King's Quest Sequel, this is a very bad move.
I hope the activision is actually going to use this IP for something great... otherwise I will be very very disappointed....
Because we don't want free excitement and promotion for an IP we wouldn't use otherwise.
Yeah.... good job Activision.