If you’ve been following our stories on Interplay and their Project: V13 / Fallout MMOG license, you will know things it’s been a bit of a roller coaster ride for a while. Now things have gotten a lot worse. According to the most recent 10-K filing by Interplay Entertainment Corp (OTC:IPLY), Bethesda Softworks, the current owners of the Fallout IP, have issued a notice to Interplay that they intend to terminate the license back agreement on grounds of Interplay’s failure to begin full development and raise funding by the 2 year deadline.
Interplay states “Interplay adamantly disputes these claims.”
At present it is not clear what basis Interplay has for disputing these claims as their financials do not display any financing secured that nears the required amount of 30 million dollars. Interplay has a cash balance of zero and a working capital deficit of something in the range of 2.4 million dollars at year end. If you think about it, Interplay needs serious cash just to stay alive. If they don’t know where they are getting that cash from, where are they going to find another 30 million on top of it? For a company with little operational incoming cash flow and no credit facilities, Interplay are in a very tough position.
For everyone out there saying, well they can change a few aspects of the game and call it something else, I remind you the License-Back agreement states that Interplay cannot develop any MMOG with a similar environment to Fallout, e.g. Vaults, wasteland, etc. That puts a serious dent in any sort of Interplay created “spiritual successor”, which is all the rage with the kids these days.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see the rights go back to Bethesda or their parent ZeniMax and be handed off to the recently formed ZeniMax Online Studio’s who will crank out a Fallout MMOG as one of their first major products. What do you think will happen?
Even though Interplay teamed up with Masthead, I think this was inevitable. Pulling together the amount of cash they needed in such a short time was just too much to do.
I still think that Masthead will be providing the funding as stated by Interplay earlier. I expect the legal proceeding to go on for a while yet, as they will have to prove this.
Why would Masthead be providing funding and the engine/development skills? How would Masthead provide that much in funding when they are working on their own MMOG? Masthead is a privately funded company, but I think it would be too risky to proceed with funding what is essentially a competitor (post-apocalyptic earth).
Also, I’m not too sure how much a “Binding Letter of Intent” can hold up to in court.
I don’t think the press release is clear with who is providing funding, Masthead or Interplay. Masthead is definitely doing the development, under direction of Interplay.
i think interplay will keep the rights.
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Bethesda needs to piss off. They already ruined my favorite game ever by sucking the corporate wanker and reproducing Oblivion in a post-apocalyptic manner. “Well, you have two years to do it. We’re scared to admit that we’re going to f**k this game Fallout 3 up, but are a bunch off assholes and couldn’t let you profit after we flop since everyone and their mother will run back to Interplay crying about how much our game blew ass.” Yeah, that’s about it. I’d love to see Chris Taylor standing on the table during one of Bethesda’s board meetings taking a s**t on their design plans for anything else that has to do with Fallout.