E3 is no more, but was it inevitable?
Other news includes:
Let us know what you think.
It’s the last Gaming Podcast episode of 2018, and it’s three hours long! Well, it’s to make up for the fact we won’t be doing one next week. There are only two news items, but the entire bulk of the episode is our Game Awards for 2017, and we took a different tack than most sites and podcasts by inventing our own Awards Categories!
The news we do discuss include:
We also discussed the game we’re looking forward to the most in 2018 — let us know which one you are interested in!
The first episode of 2014 is now out, as Jonah Falcon, Jordan Lund and Dan Quick recap the major news of 2014.
The news includes:
Also, some Listener Feedback, and the Questions of the Week, “What was the biggest event of 2013? What was your favorite game?”
One of the great downfalls of an acquisition or merger, in the game industry, is the loss of great franchise titles. Sierra, or Sierra Online, once stood on its own as a company with great gaming titles but later fell into the depths of Hades under many different company names.
Sierra’s last stop on the acquisition highway was Vivendi, years after much of Sierra’s steam had slowed. Now, they’re part of Activision Blizzard so we had high hopes they’d find a great use for some of the old Sierra properties long since collecting dust. Space Quest, Kings Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and especially Gabrielle Knight were some of our favorites, but times have changed.
“We are retaining only those franchises that are a strong fit with our long-term strategy including Crash Bandicoot, Ice Age and Spyro, as well as Prototype and a second game that has not yet been announced. We will not publish any other titles that previously were part of the Vivendi Games portfolio and we are currently reviewing our options regarding those titles,” says Activision Blizzard (joystiq)
This is unfortunate news, Activision Blizzard now has a large set of franchises on their hands, many of which have collected dust for years. Those dust collecting franchises could rise from the dead and reinvigorate their old fan base… or be dropped to the earth as unwanted scrapes after a big hunt with the vultures awaiting their take (sorry, too much watching of Animal Planet)
A reworked Kings Quest or Gabriel Knight could have seriously awesome potential in this time and age, imagine a dark comedy version of Gabriel Knight or a huge scaled world in King Quest using todays graphic engines. Although, these titles could also go the way Atari has gone and taken a well remembered franchise and made mud of its great name (*cough* Alone in the Dark).
Unfortunately, we’ll probably never know the distance an old franchise could go in this new world. We’ll have to pull out an old copy of our prized posessions and remember just how great they once where.
