Play It Again: Fargo Eyeing Rights to Another Early Interplay Game
By ANDREW SIMONS
It’s back to basics again for Brian Fargo (photo), chief executive of Newport Beach video game developer InXile Entertainment Inc.
Fargo, who founded Irvine’s Interplay Entertainment Corp. in 1982 and was ousted in 2001, is rumored to have acquired the rights to “Wasteland,” a cult-classic game Fargo created in the 1980s while at Interplay.
That would make “Wasteland” the second title Fargo has bought through InXile Entertainment, the company he opened 50 yards from the beach on Balboa Peninsula in 2002.
Last June, Fargo bought the rights to “The Bard’s Tale” from Redwood City-based Electronics Arts Inc. Fargo also created “The Bard’s Tale” while at Interplay.
For the past two weeks, Fargo has been on a global press tour to promote InXile. He wasn’t available for comment last week.
“Wasteland” is touted as the first role-playing game to feature a setting different than that of the traditional “Dungeons and Dragons” world. In it, a group of rangers wander around a desert near Las Vegas after a third world war.
In “The Bard’s Tale,” players take on the role of a Bard (a traveling minstrel) who has adventures as he pursues various quests.
InXile plans to release “The Bard’s Tale” this fall.
So far, early reviews of the game have been positive.
“It has all the right things going for it,” said Dave Kosak, executive editor of GameSpy, an online gaming site run by Irvine’s GameSpy Industries Inc. “There’s a lot of nostalgia for it. They are attacking it with a novel approach. The character they are making is funny.”
Plans for “Wasteland” haven’t been detailed yet.
Fargo has a long history in the video game business.
While he was at Interplay, he oversaw production of hits such as the “Baldur’s Gate” series of role-playing series. Fargo’s roots, and much of his work, are in games for personal computers.
As money in the game industry started flowing to consoles,Sony Inc.’s PlayStation, for one,Interplay had to change gears.
Fargo oversaw Interplay’s 1995 buy of Laguna Beach’s Shiny Entertainment Inc., a maker of console games such as “Earthworm Jim.” The deal made Interplay a player in both markets.
In 2001, Fargo was ousted from Interplay when France’s Titus Interactive SA took a majority stake in the company. The “InXile” name for his new company is a slight dig at Interplay.
Fargo said he has big plans for InXile. In addition to “The Bard’s Tale,” InXile might be working on some other titles.
One idea Fargo had was for a game where the main character was a playboy who was “motivated by women and money and nothing else.”
The inspiration: “Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,” the latest in a series of games in which the main character tries to gain power by strong-arming street gangs and gets around by stealing cars.
“Our audience is 25 years old,” Fargo said in an earlier interview.
But the video game business is brutal.
“Ultimately, they face the challenge to compete with more large established studios, which have very large publishers and have a lot of resources to make their games good,” said Greg Kasavin, executive editor of GameSpot, an online game site run by San Francisco’s CNet Networks Inc.
InXile already has cleared a hurdle for upstart game makers by striking a North American distribution deal with Vivendi Universal SA. In the past year, Fargo has signed other deals with companies around the world.
In December, Fargo signed a deal with Japan’s Omake Interactive Services to find publishing houses in Asian markets. In November, InXile signed a publishing agreement with Acclaim Entertainment Inc. for European markets.
“Because he’s done this before with Interplay, it allows him to avoid a lot of pitfalls,” Kosak said of Fargo.
