A small group of loyal King’s Quest fans have been toiling away on a fan-made sequel to the classic adventure series for eight years. Eight years! At one point, Vivendi, the IP rights holder, got all uppity and made an attempt to shut the project down, but an agreement was reached that allowed the team to continue working on the project. Known as “The Silver Lining”, the team hoped to release the game, for free of course, at some point in 2010.
Unfortunately, Activision recently came into possession of the King’s Quest IP and are now acting like big, throbbing dicks. That’s a technical term, look it up. Activision has demanded that all materials relating to King’s Quest be removed from The Silver Lining Website, in effect destroying eight years of dedication and labor…and for what? They weren’t going to make any money from this project. The Silver Lining was made for fans by fans. No threat whatsoever to Activision’s license.
A sad turn of events that makes Activision the Darth Vader of the gaming industry, at least until the next corporate snafu comes along and pisses me off.
Statement from The Silver Lining Team:
To Our Fans:
In 2005, Phoenix Online Studios received a Cease & Desist letter from Vivendi Universal, the owners of the King’s Quest IP, in regards to our work on The Silver Lining. We complied with the request, and over the months that followed, we were able to work out a non-commercial fan license with Vivendi that allowed us to continue our work on the game.
We have spent a lot of time recently reworking the material of The Silver Lining into episodic releases, with the first out of a planned five episodes completed, and submitted for review, and had hoped we would be able to bring our game to you, the fans, in the Spring of 2010.
Recently, however, ownership of the Sierra IP changed hands and became the property of Activision. After talks and negotiations in the last few months between ourselves and Activision, they have reached the decision that they are not interested in granting a non-commercial license to The Silver Lining, and have asked that we cease production and take down all related materials on our website.
As before, we must and will comply with this decision, as much as we may wish we could do otherwise.
We cannot say enough how much we appreciate the support we have had over these years from our fans. Without you, we would never have gotten this far. There would be no game to develop, and no one to develop it for. You have been amazing and steadfast, and we will always remember that and appreciate it more than we can say.
Sadly, after eight years of dedicated work and even more dedicated fans, The Silver Lining project is closing down.
What the future holds for us, as individuals or a team, we cannot say. We have an amazing development team, however, filled with talented and hard-working individuals, and we hope the teamwork and rapport we’ve developed won’t go to waste. We hope that when we do know what the future holds for us, our fans will be there to enjoy what we can give them still.
Again, thank you all so much for everything. This has been a long and crazy road, full of more twists than we could’ve anticipated, but more triumphs and wonderful memories than we could’ve ever hoped for. And for that, to all of you and to everyone on our team, we will always be grateful.
Thank You,
The Silver Lining Development Team
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