Interplay Finally In Process Of Going Under?

Random Guru 42 writes "GameSpot is reporting that Interplay is sliding further down the spiral of going out of business. Hopefully the rumors of Interplay's demise are greatly exaggerated." We previously covered earlier rumblings of Interplay's demise, and Sivar writes "According to a Fallout news website, Interplay has 'told the employees to file for unemployment' [a later source indicates 'the employees have until Friday to move all of their personal possessions out of... the Interplay offices]." Finally, an update to the GameSpot story has an un-named, masked employee insisting on the closure rumors: "No, that's not true" - it's also pointed out Interplay "...is facing a battery of lawsuits, including one by Arden Realty for $432,000 in back rent and another by BioWare for $156,000 for unpaid Baldur's Gate royalties."

Star Trek:Secret of Vulcan Fury

[Picass0]

It would be nice to see this game finally hit the auction block, to be recycled or incorporated into another game. It featured D.Kelly's last performance as Dr. McCoy. It was never finished byInterplay because of costs, so the game never saw the lightof day beyond some cool promo trailers.

Damn

[darkjedi521]

Time to order anything I wanted out of their back catalog before they go under and those titles are unavailable and near impossible to find.

I'll Miss Them...

[blueZhift]

I still foundly remember those Star Trek adventure games they published back in the early 90's. But especially Starfleet Command which as an old Starfleet Battles player, was a dream come true!

Re:It's all about Descent

[moosesocks]

Don't forget about Freespace!

Mentioning Freespace 3 or Descent 4 on one of the fan forums will result in a horde of homicidal maniacs [penguinbomb.com] descending upon you.

(FS and FS2 are two of the greatest games ever created. The community has done some incredible work improving the game using the source code after it was released including a port of FS1 to the FS2 engine)

That list is only the console titles

[cgenman]

Interplay has also published a lot of PC titles, under their own name and under that of MacPlay, which has already been retired. Here is a more complete [gamespot.com] list from GameSpot, though it doesn't include anything predating the SNES.

Re:I'll Miss Them...

[Sigma 7]

But especially Starfleet Command which as an old Starfleet Battles player, was a dream come true!

I would disagree here, mainly because I've attempted to write a mod for SFC. The API given for writing SFC mods is not up to par, and can quickly throw you into some very interesting limitations.

For example, I've attempted to modify the Tourneyfest to support AI players. It seemed to work find, but I quickly ran into problems with the AI players. In no particular order:

1. No matter which team I assign to the AIs, they always appear as Federation. There are ways to make sure that they are one of the other six factions, but it is not considered as dynamic as it could be. (tMissionInfo::mSetTeamRace sets the race for a team, but does not change the race for such a team after it has been created. You can't change it directly either, mainly because the team is stored in a Private section of the class.)

2. When you create a ship, you are neither returned a handle to the newly created ship, nor can you determine the existance of that ship without iterating through the entire list (assuming that it is possible.)

3. The documentation that came with the API was fairly poor - requiring the programmer to do a lot of guesswork of whcih functions did which.

The gameplay portion isn't bad - however, if you peek at the gory insides of the game itself, you'll begin to wonder how it managed to hold itself together.