DOOM is good, to general incredulity.
The whole world is loudly, vocally, relentlessly amazed. DOOM is good! Unbelievement! Dumbfoundery! Getouttaheah!
It occurs to me how cruel and backhanded this startled praise must feel to the developers. I mean think about it: You did your job well. Everyone is astonished. What a shitty compliment.
We don’t usually bother with news around here, but sometimes it’s News and deserves a remark.
The Industry said a collective “whoa” on Friday when it learned that John Carmack, programming megamind and id Software co-founder, creator of Doom and Quake and Rage, has left the company he built. Several months ago Carmack took on a new role as Chief Technology Officer at Oculus VR – they of the eventual Oculus Rift headset – and it’s on this role that he is going to focus his attention.
Dishonored and XCOM came out on the same day in the United States, doing few favors to the free time of serious gamers. As for me personally? I haven’t had any free time in the past six months. It’s been one very long, very exhausting sprint of professional responsibilities, leaving me scarcely time to check my email, let alone immerse myself in games. I haven’t seen anyone socially in months. And then Dishonored and XCOM arrive, both on the same day, and of course I bought them both because I’m me, and here I am trying to insert slivers of play time no wider than acupuncture needles here and there into the unyielding mass of my schedule. Luckily I think that’s a light further on down the tunnel, so hopefully things will go back to normal soon. And I have been finding a little time to play.
Former GSC Game World marketing director and rumor-guy Sergey Galyonkin, the fellow who broke the news of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. developer’s collapse a few months ago, has a new juicy rumor for us: that Bethesda Softworks, of Elder Scrolls and Fallout 3 fame, has acquired rights to publish another game in the STALKER franchise. Assuming the rumor’s true at all, it should be noted that Bethsoft hasn’t picked up ownership of STALKER IP. That, apparently, still belongs to former GSC honcho Sergei Grigorovich, the fellow who abruptly shut down the Ukrainian developer in the first place.
Franchise or publication rights, it still seems like an odd choice for Bethsoft to pick up, y’know?
This meme has been finding its way around the internet of late: where is the next Elder Scrolls game? Oblivion arrived in March of 2006, about four years after Morrowind, its immediate predecessor. Based on that admittedly limited trend, we should have at least heard an announcement by now, right? Well, Fallout 3 surely intervened, as did Bethsoft’s parent company ZeniMax buying id Software. That alone means that Bethesda’s long and chummy relationship with Emergent …
All right, calm down, people. We all knew this was coming. Fallout: New Vegas arrives today, and the news is that it’s… well… it’s from Obsidian.
News across the wire (well, it’s yesterday’s news, we at Tap-Repeatedly pride ourselves on the timeliness of our reporting) states that id Software, once-mighty creators of DOOM, Quake, and… well, of DOOM and Quake, has been acquired by the mysterious ZeniMax Media Group, the parent company that also owns Bethesda Softworks of Elder Scrolls and Fallout 3 fame. With this buyout, Bethesda will now be publishing all of id’s games, severing the longstanding relationship between …