Legend Entertainment

» see legendent.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Infocom shut in 1989. Bob Bates and Mike Verdu had met there, and rather than treat that as a verdict on the format they treated it as an opening. Bates found funding through American Systems Corporation, and Legend Entertainment set up in Chantilly, Virginia, with the position that the parser had died of neglect rather than of old age.

The first game was Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls in 1990, designed by Steve Meretzky, who had written some of the funniest things Infocom ever shipped. It ran a parser, and it also ran a picture at the top of the screen and a row of clickable verbs at the bottom. That was the entire thesis. You could still type, but you did not have to guess the verb.

Then came the run that people who were there still bring up. Timequest in 1991. Eric the Unready in 1993, which took Computer Gaming World's adventure game of the year. Death Gate in 1994, off the Weis and Hickman books. Mission Critical and Shannara both landed in 1995. Superhero League of Hoboken was Meretzky again. The games were funny in a way that has aged unevenly and written in a way that has not aged at all.

By the time Legend made something that could have reached me, it was no longer making the thing it existed for. I knew Unreal in 2003, the way anyone who spent hours in a Turkish internet cafe knew Unreal. I did not know Legend, and neither did anybody I played next to. That gap is not an accident of geography, it is what the studio agreed to in order to keep the lights on.

~ the dossier ~

~ the picture window ~

The illustrated adventure was a real answer to a real problem, and it had a short window. Sierra was going fully graphical and point-and-click, and typing was starting to read as a chore rather than a conversation. Legend's compromise let a writer keep writing while a player kept clicking, which meant the puzzles could stay verbal without demanding that the player be a mind reader.

What killed the format was not that it was wrong. CD-ROM arrived, full motion video arrived, and the money moved to whatever could be described on the back of a box in one sentence. A parser could not be described that way. By 1997, with Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, Legend was making adventure games for an audience that retail had already decided did not exist.

~ the pivot ~

So the studio changed shape. In 1999 it shipped The Wheel of Time, a first person shooter on the Unreal engine built off Robert Jordan's books, and it was good enough that nobody had to be embarrassed about it. GT Interactive bought Legend that same year. GT was swallowed by Infogrames, and Infogrames put on the Atari name.

Unreal II: The Awakening came out in 2003, developed by Legend for Epic's franchise. Late that year the studio gave away Unreal II: XMP, a free multiplayer expansion, with the first playable build going out on 9 december. It was competent work on someone else's property, done by a company that had once existed to argue about the future of the sentence.

~ what really happened ~

Atari closed Legend Entertainment on friday 16 january 2004. The reason given was that it was purely a business decision, and that Legend had just finished its only current project with nothing new in the pipeline. People close to the studio said at the time that there was in fact something in development, which was never confirmed and never will be now.

Five weeks between shipping a free expansion and being switched off. Whatever the pipeline actually contained, the sequence tells you the studio had no say in it.

~ what replaced it ~

Bob Bates kept writing about game design and ended up as a chief creative officer at Zynga, which is a sentence that would have confused everyone in Chantilly in 1991. Mike Verdu went to Electronic Arts and eventually to Netflix. Glen Dahlgren went on to Star Trek Online.

The games themselves came back cheaply and quietly through digital storefronts, which is the only reason anyone under forty has played Eric the Unready. Legend's real inheritance is not a series, it is the idea that a text game can have a mouse in it without lying about what it is. Everything currently sold as interactive fiction with a nice interface is standing on that.

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