Legend Entertainment

Legend Entertainment
Private
Industry Interactive entertainment
Fate Shut down
Founded 1989
Founder Bob Bates, Mike Verdu
Defunct January 16, 2004
Headquarters Chantilly, Virginia, United States
Key people
 Bob Bates[1]
Mike Verdu[2]
Steve Meretzky[3]
Michael J. Lindner[4]
Owner Private until acquired in 1998 by GT Interactive (which became Infogrames)

Legend Entertainment was an American developer of computer games, best known for their complex, distinctive adventure titles throughout the 1990s.

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.

By 1994 games like Xanth and Eric the Unready gave Legend a reputation for comedy adventures.[5] 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."

Games

Interactive fiction

Graphic adventures

Other

Reception

In October 1998, Greg Costikyan quoted Legend Entertainment's Bob Bates as saying that the company "typically sells 100,000-150,000 copies of the adventure games they release, with overseas sales basically doubling the total number sold."[6]

References

  1. ↑ "Bob Bates - Game Credits". www.mobygames.com.
  2. ↑ "Mike Verdu - Game Credits". www.mobygames.com.
  3. ↑ "Steve Eric Meretzky - Game Credits". www.mobygames.com.
  4. ↑ "Michael Lindner - Game Credits". www.mobygames.com.
  5. ↑ Wilson, Johnny L. (August 1994). "The Toxic Humormonger". Computer Gaming World. pp. 46–48.
  6. ↑ Costikyan, Greg (October 21, 1998). "The adventure continues". Salon.com. Archived from the original on August 16, 2000.
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