Daily News Spin — February 27, 2001 (Tuesday)

Noooooooooo!!!!!!!!

Ack! Dreamland has been cancelled! Julian Gollop announced the news on the Mythos forum.

It is with great regret that I have to announce that Dreamland has been cancelled. We have been looking for another publisher for a while now, but no agreement has been reached and we have run out of cash. This means that there will be no further development on the game.

Thank you to everybody that has contributed to this forum and thanks for your encouragement and support. If there is any further news about the future of Dreamland I will keep you posted.

This is major suckage. Dreamland was what most of us called the spiritual successor to X-COM. Can't a publisher pony up some money and get this game finished? Sheesh, this is disappointing news.

Well, Quarter to Three is officially blaming the PS2 development for this game as the culprit. No, we have no idea if that delayed the game to where Mythos ran out of money, but it makes us feel better to blame it on that damned console.

Diablo's new character class: The Lawyer

Blue's News is reporting on an Inside.com story about a lawsuit filed by Blizzard against New Line Cinema over a movie called Diablo that New Line is developing. Of note in the article is that Blizzard claims they are going to develop a Diablo movie.

In the complaint, Blizzard said it intends to produce a film called Diablo and based on the game. The suit notes Blizzard owns a trademark, filed in April 1996 and approved in July 2000, for that Diablo movie mark, which the suit also notes is currently being contested by New Line. Further, Blizzard also has a pending application for a movie called Diablo II: Salvation, filed in February 1997 and approved in July 2000.

Blizzard claims that New Line's Diablo film, an action vehicle for actor Vin Diesel, went into production Dec. 12 of last year. ''On information and belief, Defendant New Line Cinema adopted its mark 'Diablo' for its movie after Blizzard's record setting $103,000,000 sales for DIABLO and DIABLO II, and after Blizzard's DIABLO mark became famous,'' the suit says. It goes on to allege that New Line's filing to oppose Blizzard's trademark for a Diablo movie is a concession that there could be confusion between the two products.

The New Line movie is about a drug lord named Diablo. Well, Diablo's a bit a drug, isn't it?

"Mad Magazine Does Management"

Yahoo has posted an AP review of Stardock's The Corporate Machine.

The overall look and feel of ``The Corporate Machine'' is a sort of Mad Magazine Does Management, but the business realities it requires the player to balance are real enough, including bribing politicians and fomenting or dealing with labor unrest.

Stardock has a keen eye for the corporate process, including employee training and motivation and how the various corporate parts and processes must interact to get and maintain market share. It presents all those potentially mind-numbing issues in an entertaining way.

Uproar loses money, lots of it

Showing once again that getting people to your website doesn't result in profits necessarily, Uproar showed a net loss of $20.8 million for the fourth quarter of 2000, up a bit from the $17.5 million they lost a year earlier. They did post increated revenues of $12.5 million, up from $5.1 million a year ago. Uproar is owned by Vivendi, which is the owner of Havas (or maybe Vivendi is Havas Interactive's new name?). We need a scorecard to keep them all straight.

Boy, we wish we could burn through and lose $40 million or so running this site. That would be awesome!

Age of Star Wars

Normally, we don't reprint most of a press release on the main page, but this is exciting news.

SAN RAFAEL, Calif. -- February 27, 2001 -- LucasArts Entertainment Company LLC today announced a strategic alliance with Ensemble Studios to develop a new and compelling Real Time Strategy (RTS) franchise for the digital interactive gaming market. The initial release from this cooperative venture, Star Wars Battleground, will be built upon PC-based technology created by Ensemble and used in the highly acclaimed Age of Empires series. Combining the design talents of LucasArts and Ensemble -- including noted designer Bruce Shelley -- Star Wars Battleground will build upon Ensemble's proprietary engine technology to usher in a new phase in the evolution of the RTS game. Star Wars Battleground is expected to release fall 2001.

Future ventures with LucasArts are envisaged to encompass new technologies developed by Ensemble, weaving increasingly innovative engineering into the core premise of interactive strategic warfare within the Star Wars universe.

"From the first time I played Age of Empires, I knew someday LucasArts and Ensemble should work together to create the ultimate RTS franchise," says Simon Jeffery, president of LucasArts. "Gaming is evolving rapidly and fewer massively successful games are stumbled upon by accident. The market is more aware of what it wants, and consequently we are providing a marriage of superlative design, consummate technology, and an IP-based gaming universe with which most of the western world is familiar. In short, LucasArts very much views this as the birth of a market leading franchise."

"All of at us at Ensemble are huge Star Wars fans and we're very pleased to be partners with LucasArts in creation of Star Wars Battleground," says Ensemble Studios CEO Tony Goodman. "The passion and talent of the LucasArts team blends well with our Real Time Strategy game expertise to make the Star Wars universe a compelling and fun game experience."

Big news, eh? We know Ensemble's been working on a 3D engine. We've been told that it's pretty far along and, as far as 3D RTS engines go, is really the cock of the walk, as our nutty great uncle used to say.

Update: IGN has an interview with LucasArts and it's stated that the engine for the game will use a 2D RTS engine.

3am

It's the fattest of Tuesdays, a day when if you happen to be at a lively Mardi Gras parade you can toss beads at the women and they'll do that Duke Nukem flashdance for you. Best of all, you don't even need a cheat code. Ah, these are marvelous times we live in!

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