Former type Private Defunct January 16, 2004 Founded 1989 Parent organization GT Interactive | Fate Shut down Founder Bob Bates Ceased operations January 16, 2004 | |
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Industry Interactive entertainment Key people Bob Bates
Mike Verdu
Steve Meretzky Video games Unreal II: The Awakening, The Wheel of Time, Death Gate, Eric the Unready, Companions of Xanth | ||
Bob bates legend entertainment interview bbpcgc vidcast
Legend Entertainment was an American developer of computer games, best known for their complex, distinctive adventure titles throughout the 1990s.
Contents
- Bob bates legend entertainment interview bbpcgc vidcast
- Atari epic games legend entertainment company tantalus 2004
- Interactive fiction
- Graphic adventures
- Other
- References
The company was founded in 1989 by Bob Bates and Mike Verdu after the end of Infocom. Their goal was to design interactive fiction in the Infocom tradition. Legend's first products were all illustrated text adventures, some of them designed by Infocom veteran Steve Meretzky. Starting in 1993, they switched to a new development system for graphic-only adventures. Several of their adventure games were based on book licenses, including Frederik Pohl's Gateway, Terry Brooks' Shannara, Spider Robinson's Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, Piers Anthony's Xanth, and Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's The Death Gate Cycle.
The company was acquired by GT Interactive in 1998 and began changing their focus to action games. They developed a first-person shooter based on Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time and finished the development of the second part in the Unreal series in 2002. Late in 2003, they released a free expansion for Unreal II: The Awakening, known as XMP (eXpanded MultiPlayer). In 1999, GT Interactive was purchased outright by Infogrames, who later acquired and rebranded themselves as Atari.
On Friday, January 16, 2004, Legend Entertainment was shut down. A brief press release from Atari cites that it was "purely a business decision", and that "Legend had recently completed its only current project and had no new projects in the pipeline."