Daily News Spin — September 1, 2001 (Saturday)

ECTS report

Who better than Eurogamer to report on ECTS, the European tradeshow transpiring right now in the U.K. The show is much diminished this year.

Sadly this year the lack of booth babes and adolescent fanboys isn't the only reason things are quiet though. Over the last few years most of the big name publishers have vanished, retreating into private meeting rooms one by one before departing entirely.

Electronic Arts, Activision, Infogrames, Sega and former booth kings Eidos are all amongst the regular absentees now, and this year they are joined by the likes of Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Virgin and Take 2. Meanwhile companies such as Capcom and Codemasters have disappeared into private hospitality suites targeted at retail buyers, ignoring the press entirely. Indeed, the only major publisher left at ECTS is UbiSoft. The focus this year is more on developers and smaller names, with a host of upcoming European companies expanding to fill the hole left by the big boys. The Germans are putting in a particularly strong showing this year, with both CDV and FishTank promising impressive line-ups including titles such as Aquanox, Etherlords, Neocron and Escape From Alcatraz.

This Eurogamer story deals mostly with speeches and presentations. They should have more about the games being shown in future updates

New Blizzard game revealed?

Looks like someone at Blizzard released a fan newsletter a bit early. It mentions a press release scheduled for tomorrow about their new game, World of Waracraft:

During a press conference today at the European Computer Trade Show, Blizzard Entertainment unveiled World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer, online role-playing game set in the rich fiction of Blizzard's Warcraft universe. Featuring bold 3D graphics and deep, immersive gameplay, World of Warcraft will allow thousands of players to adventure together in this epic setting and will provide them with a new, in-depth perspective on familiar lands, former battlefields, and heroes from the legendary universe. In addition, World of Warcraft will introduce new, uncharted territories and foes never before seen by followers of the series.

You can check out the page yourself. Blizzard reportedly pulled it, but someone saved it here.

Couple of thoughts about this:

1) An MMOG makes sense because Blizzard could use something to pay for Battle.net. With every new game released Blizzard has to make it playable on Battle-net — fans would revolt otherwise — but the economics have changed and it's harder to run the service at a profit. In fact, Blizzard told us last year that it loses money now on Battle.net. A successful MMOG will fund the multiplayer network for all of Blizzard's games. And even though the MMOG scene is getting to be a crowded market, Blizzard has superb brand recognition and can crash the party anytime they like.

2) Why Warcraft instead of Diablo? We'll venture a guess. An MMOG Diablo game might cut into sales of future single player Diablo games. A Warcraft RPG is something new and doesn't really infringe on the Warcraft RTS line or the Diablo line.

Thanks Jason!

Toot! Toot! Railroad Tycoon III in the works

Take 2's CEO said as much according to a Yahoo story.

Kelly Sumner, Take Two Interactive's CEO, announced Railroad Tycoon III for the end of next year.

Although no developer was named, we'd be shocked and surprised and then shocked again if PopTop didn't make it. Thanks Murph!

EverQuest hacked

Looks like some teenage hacker not only managed to hack into the EQ servers, but also hacked into Verant VP Brad McQuaid's home computer and downloaded documents detailing plans for EverQuest 2, according to the Seattle Times.

Federal agents have seized 10 computers and other computer gear from the home of a Snoqualmie teen suspected of hacking into Sony's extremely popular online game "EverQuest."

The hacking would have given him access to personal information on hundreds of thousands of players and Sony employees.

Agents also say the hacker, who was 17 at the time, was able to access the home computer of the company's vice president of product development, Brad McQuaid, and downloaded documents for an as-yet-unreleased version of the popular role-playing fantasy game....

In McQuaid's computer, the hacker copied a voluminous file containing the blueprint for the release of the game's next version, "EverQuest2," scheduled for release next year. Other personal and proprietary information was also accessed.

The kid may be a good hacker, but he may be missing a few of the synapses responsible for connecting the "common" and "sense" lobes of the brain.

For reasons unexplained, the hacker sent all of the proprietary files that were hacked to a Sony executive, "making it evident that (he) had illegally obtained the files." Until then, Sony Online Entertainment was unaware of the extent of the intrusion.

Sirtech dead

The fat knight seems to be singing. Although Wizardry 8 will be released, it looks like it will be the last game from Sirtech. The staff are all gone and they'll be closing the castle drawbridge sometime after the game is released in the next couple of months. As far patches go, we'll guess that the new publisher will be responsible for any, but going in to fiddle with someone else's code can be tricky stuff.

Game companies are really just people and properties. We'll bet that the developers will find work elsewhere in the game industry and hope that the owners of Sirtech will sell the Jagged Alliance and Wizardry brands to another publisher.

3am

Take 2 netted $1.3 million in profit the most recent quarter of business. Update: We failed to note that there was an "extraordinary charge of $1.5 million", so once the real math is done, Take 2 lost money for the quarter. Thanks to Frictionless Insight for pointing this out and suggesting we look at this Bloomberg article.

Tom interviews Sid and Bruce and Shelley and Meier in a flurry of words at posted CGOnline. This is a five page interview! (It also has a scary photo of Sid Meier. He looks like a demented axe murderer.)

It looks like Pool of Radiance 2 is about to go gold. Better hurry up and finish Arcanum!

Two patches for Arcanum have been posted. If you downloaded the initial patch, grab this fix. If you haven't patched yet, grab this new and improved patch.

Rails Across America is gold.

Duke Nukem Forever will not be out this year, according to Take 2. "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever and you know that's a long time, but still this damned game don't showeth up." Hey 3DRealms, stop playing Max Payne and start coding again!

Sega's Game Gear library is coming to handheld PCs according to this ConsoleWire story.

Special thanks to Tim Elhajj for boldy going in and fixing some forum topic link problems. Thanks Tim!

Click here to read Wednesday's news