LOL. I took it out because I thought nobody would get it!
I'm glad you caught that before I did the edit. The first time I saw your handle I just stared at it. I was thinking I may have know you from somewhere. Then it finally hit me, ALF!

I got irritated with them first in my Oblivion playing days. There were little things that bothered me about the game design but they make really buggy software. They had that long-running bug with that crash on exit that quite a lot of people complained about. Granted it didn't hurt my game but every time it happened to me I wondered what kind of a company would let that go on for so long. It spoils the whole experience.
Then I bought Fallout 3 and the first damn time I quit the game it happened and I cursed and said "Same old engine and they never cared enough, or were smart enough to figure out how to fix it." They actually shipped a brand new game with the same old bug in their old engine!
Since it was a Games for Windows Live game Microsoft asserted itself and either told them how or made them fix it in the first patch. The only benefit from their association with Microsoft that I can see. And I'll bet MS told them how to fix it.
I prefer to buy a complete game in the beginning. If you want to sell expansions, fine. But I won't fall for this DLC crap again. It takes real brass ones for a company to ship an incomplete game, Fallout 3 with it's ridiculously low level cap, when they planned more content and lifting the level cap all along. Then they force you to buy the DLC's through some stupid point system with Microsoft. I didn't buy any of the DLC's and will never buy a Bethesda game again. And I made that decision long before this problem with Interplay.
There's more but most people think I'm nitpicking. This reply is a lot longer then I intended.

LOL Man I was beginning to think I was the only one left... So glad I was wrong. :D
OMG, I see what you mean, that's outrageous. I didn't know that Oblivion had these problems. I have yet to play it, so I was unaware that they had reused the engine for FO3. If I would have known that I probably could have guessed how bad all of this was really going to turn out LOL But I would say that you are right MS, and though I try not to give them too much credit, I have yet had any problem with a game that had Microsoft involved during the actual development pipeline. (Though anyone who owns an XBox 360 that suffers from the RROD will obviously have something to say about that.) In part though Microsoft's whole business is bug smashing. For better or worse we've come a long way from Windows 98 LOL.
EXACTLY how I feel about the issue. This to me seems to be a money making scheme, and I don't like it at all. This is part of the problem with a lot of game companies (and software companies in general.) I too refuse to purchase an incomplete game or product. They're stupid if they think that I'm going to buy a game that requires me to pay in perpetuity for the 'privilege' of owning it or playing it. Some modern games require the initial investment capital of a small corporation in order just to be able to play the game 'with all the stuff' that should have been in it to begin with. Geez.
I for one don't think you're nitpicking and have echoed distaste for the practices that I myself find abhorrent. I guess though that isn't much consolation LOL.
As for the reply being longer than you intended all I have to say is "Once you pop you just can't stop!" LOL At least some of it's off your chest. You can look at this as a cheap form of therapy :D (It's not good to keep it all inside.)

I'll try to keep it short, as it's been mentioned before, but seems to have been missed in some of the posts: Comments like "I love the old Interplay games", "Interplay was really helpful to me", "Interplay loved gamers", "Interplay made FO out of thin air" are all true, but not relevant to the current situation at all -- because that Interplay has not existed for many, many years. There is a company that is now called Interplay, owned by (I believe) Titus, which gained rights to all of the beloved Interplay IP many years ago when they were going through a previous tight patch. Titus packaging up three FO games and calling it the Fallout Trilogy is another squeeze on their cash-acquired IP and an attempt to ride on Bethesda's current market interest (whether Bethesda deserves it or not, and I'm not going there again). So, basically, Titus did to Interplay years ago what Bethesda is doing to Titus now. Can't say I particularly feel sorry for them. Karma's a pain.
Meanwhile, the people you love and respect have moved on to other companies. Check out inXile for at least some of them.
And for further repetition -- this is not Bethesda fanboy defense, just trying to clear out some of the misplaced loyalty. I love the old Interplay, but there is no current "true" Interplay for me to defend. And if you're worried about "classic FO" becoming unavailable once Bethesda has it, consider that Bethesda has released DRM-free Arena and Daggerfall for free downloads, for people to fiddle around in the pre-history of the newer games. Doesn't seem entirely out of the question for them to do the same with FO, eventually. Or maybe not, but I'd expect them to leave current functioning sales channels open and just redirect the funds to themselves. And, while maybe they don't fully deserve those funds, I'd say that producing FO3 (whatever your opinion of it) gives them more "moral right" to income from FO1/2/Tactics than Titus ever had, given that Titus never actually did anything to support/advance the FO universe at all...

I will agree that those particular comments are not exactly germane to the law suite issue. But surely you don't fault some of us for being a little nostalgic over a company that made a lot of gamers happy? Besides most of the people that I have talked to ( and myself included) already understand that there is a BIG difference between Interplay of yesteryear and the Interplay of today. Totally different beasts.
Actually this is an interesting historical tidbit which is cool and I agree what goes around comes around. But I would like to point out that Titus kept FO under Interplay branding... Just saying.
Yes some of them did go there and I wish them all the best in the world. Let us use an analogy. Think of the development team like a band. Certain people can come and go from the band, and the band will more than likely stay the same (sometimes better, sometimes worse) but it's the same band. The band can switch record labels but it's still the same band. But once it breaks up you don't necessarily follow the bands that absorb the members from the original band. You just know that for a short time certain individuals came together and made a memorable band which created songs that spoke to who you are as a person. You may not know the names Bon Scott, Simon Wright or Angus Young, but (chances are) you do know AC/DC. The point is that a Band like a development team is a creative/cumulative endeavor that produces something that holds a little piece of all that were involved (songs or games) and you can't re-create that type of thing by just throwing money at it. In the end though it's the songs(games) that are important (Bands come and go after all).
It isn't loyalty to an almost defunct company that irritates me about this. (Companies come and go after all.) It's about an industry that has become increasingly shallow and hateful towards the very people who made it what it is... the Gamer. It just isn't like what it used to be. Now it's about milking you for as much money as possible while running historic franchises into the ground, and giving you less and less for that same money. That's another topic altogether though.
If we were to continue the band analogy from before, the song (in this case games) are what is important. Not the band(the developers) since they've moved on or the record label (Bethesda/Interplay). I am loyal only to the three original games themselves, with a great deal of respect on those who worked on it, and a nostalgic feeling towards the company they were under when it was made.
Arena and Daggerfall aren't exactly FO though. To me this is only a minor gesture at best. With that said you have a lot more faith in this company than what I would give them. I've listed my reasons elsewhere. But also what worries me is that they could start doing a Spielberg or Lucas. By changing it for re-release like Spielberg did for ET by changing the weapons of the cops to radios. Or Lucas forcing new CGI effects and scenes into the original three Star Wars Movies. Which made it look bad and the new Return of the Jedi looks horrible. Have you tried buying these on DVD without the extra crap in them? What if Bethesda starts changing stuff in the original three? Would you be willing to have a FO3-Clone relabeled and branded as FO1 and FO2, and the good originals forgotten?
I don't know by most accounts of what I've read that they(Bethesda) want to close ALL sales channels completely, at least until after the lawsuit.
They are and do make money from the sale of the original three. (I heard 17%) Titus may not have done anything to progress the FO universe, but at least they didn't bastardize it. The original three can stand on their own merit thank you very much. We'll have to wait and see if people are still talking about FO3 in good terms 12 years from now. Time will tell.

Don't fault you at all. I have extremely fond memories of good times with Interplay games, and of having almost every game on my shelf be an Interplay title. It just appeared that much of the anger towards Bethesda wasn't about FO as much as it was about "what those b's are doing to INTERPLAY!". And it's that focus that seems out of place.
As for what Bethesda did to the FO franchise themselves, well, I know that I disliked the game immensely. From a shallow technical standpoint of annoyance with the zombie-like acting/walking of the humans in the starting Vault up through the totally irrational behavior of the people (Me, after being verbally abused by an NPC I thought I had just "rescued" -> "Yes, I did kill him -- didn't you notice that he was paying a man to beat the carp out of you? Sorry for trying to help, dink."), and the total feeling of "oh, lord, I don't wanna trudge through all that" when I stepped out of the Vault (which is actually probably theme appropriate, I suppose, but still not fun -- and games should be fun first)
To leap ahead to some of your later comments, I'm not sure that the Interplay branding is the important bit. If, as you say, the GAME is the important part, what does it actually matter which company name it happens to be sold under now? If the original band were still together, then I would want at least some of the money from GoG sales to go to them. But since they aren't, I really have no further interest in whether it's Titus or Bethesda or WalMart that gets the money -- as long as I can still get my old games. I believe Baldur's Gate (series), another Interplay classic, is now sold under Atari, and in general the new Atari annoys me immensely -- but I still picked up the 4 game box set after losing some of my originals. And the games, oddly enough, are just as good as they used to be, even though "Interplay" doesn't appear anywhere on the box :)
Granted, partially. I fully agree that the Interplay we loved was something magical about those people in that place at that time. I don't agree, however, that the band will be the same when all of the members have left. To further your analogy, if Aaron Carter and the Jonas brothers got together and bought the rights to the AC/DC song catalog, then formed a band under that name, _NOBODY_ would try to defend them as being AC/DC. But by your analogy, it would still be the same band. But game companies are impersonal corporate beasts. All we've got to lock onto is the name, and so we tend to associate much more with the name than we should.
(Oh, and as for following ex-band members into new bands -- well, let's just say that I'm not all that impressed with the only thing I've seen to come out of inXile, which was the re-envisioning of The Bard's Tale from a few years ago. But I can always hope that maybe they'll get their groove back)
Absolute, full, and complete agreement -- which seems to make my original point, though, when I read it. Interplay went, FO remains, so why does it matter whose name is on the box?
Actually, that would seem to be at the core of the matter. Many of the arguments surrounding this case are dressed in details of this particular instance -- and are typically misguided because of it. We're all angry about the state of PC gaming (oh, lord, yes). It's been very hard going finding a game that I could enjoy over the last several years, and I hate Bethesda for running as hard as they can in what I perceive to be the wrong direction with the ES franchise. I have no confidence whatsoever that FO4, if ever created, will be worth anything. But then, there was never going to be a good -- much less great -- successor to FO1/2/Tactics (unless some indie developer makes one). But none of that is really directly germane to this particular instance above any of the other deals going on. Personally, I'm much happier seeing a gripe about "Bethesda and Atari and Ubisoft are killing games and nobody 'gets it' like Interplay used to" than I am seeing a gripe about "Bethesda is just a bunch of a's for suing Interplay". The first gripe is valid and legitimate. The second, not so much.
True, they're different game genres, but I'm not sure that I see releasing full games for free along with instructions for how to set up DosBox to play them now is a "minor gesture at best". But whatever. I am also incensed by Lucas's SW remakes -- but keep in mind that he IS the original IP holder, so that example is more suggestive of if Interplay had kept the IP and decided to remake the first stories in a FPS 3D form.
As for Bethesda changing the old games -- hah! They can barely use the engine that they bought and have full tech support for. There's no chance they could do anything with the old engines that they don't have source for. And as for making a new game branded FO1 or FO2 and the classics being forgotten -- do you have so little faith in the quality of the old games to think that they could be forgotten? People would just start calling them "Classic Fallout" or "The Original Fallout".
I'm not sure I can get all that excited about defending "at least they didn't change anything -- they just kept squeezing all the money they could get out of it". Nor do I actually expect Bethesda to be any different, with regard to the originals, except that they do have a history of "that game will never be available again" (but then they eventually released them totally free, so it's hard to extract a pattern). As for FO3 being fondly remembered years from now, not a chance. The only people who seem to like FO3 are console gamers and the "hehheheh -- I nuked a town!" crowd. They've got the attention span of a shrew on speed.
I think we actually agree on many of the points at the core of the grief:
1. Interplay isn't making great games for us any more.
2. Nobody is making great games for us any more.
3. Bethesda is strongly in the "shallow but pretty" camp of game development -- lust like every other currently existing company.
As much as those points irritate me, I don't see how to fix it with human's being what they are. Gamers who want depth and quality in their games are a minority (a VERY vocal minority :) but a minority nonetheless). And when producing a current generation game costs significantly more than a major Hollywood blockbuster, you've got to sell to the unwashed masses. It ain't pretty, and it annoys me immensely, but I'm more angry at all the shallow people than I am at the game developers. Developing a game that I would like, in today's market, is virtually guaranteed to drive you into bankruptcy, because most people are too stupid to enjoy it. Elitist, I know, but let's be honest with ourselves -- we're all fairly elitist about good (old) games vs the trash being made now.
Bleah. Way longer than I wanted, but got to stop and don't have time to edit down... Hopefully I got all the quote markup right...
Only marginally related, but for those of you with programming, artwork, modelling, animating, and writing talents, the good people working on PARPG (Post-Apocalyptic RPG - http://blog.parpg.net/ ) would probably love some help.

Well yes, for me it is about the FO trilogy, after all Bethesda got the rights fair and square. But it's like Jurassic Park, just because you can do something (sue them) doesn't mean you should.
Well I don't know I never had that problem when I first stepped out of the Vault of FO1/2, so I think that although it could be a genre appropriate, it doesn't have to be. I actually found myself looking forward to the journey ahead.
Actually I stated this ideal in my original post but I'll clear that up further down. (I guess I wasn't clear enough, sorry :( )
You're right on all of this, and I agree... keep reading. :)
OK now I'll clear everything up, yes there was something magical about the time and place, but I never said the band would be the same if all of the members left. What I actually said was:
"Certain people can come and go from the band, and the band will more than likely stay the same (sometimes better, sometimes worse) but it's the same band."
Certain people is the keyword. Almost any one person in the band is 'expendable' (for lack of a better word.) Even if one or possibly two leave, as long as it isn't the person with the original creative force (as in Kurt Cobain and Nirvana), the band will still move along in the same general direction. Sometimes this works out (AC/DC and Brian Johnson) sometimes it doesn't (Limp Bizkit & their bassist), nevertheless it is possible for it to continue under these types of conditions.
Nevertheless as far as how important the company is on the box, and who gets what royalties from the games I also said:
I said the games were the important part, not those who sell them :D
So see we do agree on this issue, the company matters little, and since the developers have moved on they truly are out of the picture now. (Which is still a little sad to me. But this is life and what not.)
I'm glad we are in agreement, but I must admit this sentence had me a little befuddled, did you mean that you got what I was trying to say after reading the post? Or am I just misreading? And you're right, no it doesn't matter whose name is on the silly box.
You're not serious about really doubting the production of a FO4 are you? This was just cynicism and sarcasm right? By all accounting principles this was a 'smash hit' that will spawn countless sequels that will continue until the profit margin shrinks to almost nothing. It's going to turn into another Final Fantasy... It never is Final. Sometimes I think it's better to let old things die and just remember them the way they were. Before the desecration really kicks in.
Absolutely! But I still question motives.
Well to me these aren't on a 'classical' status like FO. But I should put my view in context for better understanding. To me a good gesture was (and this is actually kind of funny since Bethesda owns them now) when Id released the source to Doom, Quake, Quake 2, etc, etc. These games have totally been revived with ports to MP3 players and the like, not to mention there are a ton of mods that are really fun to play. This was a big gesture to me. The 'unofficial' patches to FO have to be made by 'hackers' who just love the game.
Yes you are right, this connection was fundamentally and logically flawed. Nevertheless it is annoying :D[quote_ 50]MacReiter: As for Bethesda changing the old games -- hah! They can barely use the engine that they bought and have full tech support for. There's no chance they could do anything with the old engines that they don't have source for.