From The Archives: Legend Entertainment
of from the ashes Formed in 1989 giants Infocom, adventure game peppered Entertainment Legend its line of the Nineties with fiction – impressive interactive graphics! Graeme now with added to founders Mason speaks Mike Verdu Bob Bates and
Read about the software house that was inspired by text adventures like Zork
Bob Bates, joint-founder of Legend Entertainment, grew up with games. “My parents had eight children and we were always playing something, card games, board games, puzzles,” he says. “But it was a time before personal computers had been invented, so text adventures had no influence on me growing up.” Bob’s route to discovering the genre began, appropriately, via the written word. “When I was 30, I started working on a novel, and two years later it still wasn’t done. My father was an early adopter of computers, and gave me a TRS-80 to use as a word processor to help with the writing.” Sitting on the TRS-80 was a game by the name of Zork. “I loved it, and thought that with my background as a writer and puzzler, I might make a good games designer.”
Bob decided to create his own company, Challenge Inc, in order to publish games, and compete with Zork’s creators, Infocom. “But I soon got into discussions with them to see if I could license their development engine. One thing led to another and eventually I became Infocom’s first outside developer.” Like Bob, Mike Verdu dreamed of becoming a writer before discovering the incredible creative power of computers. “One of my friends was lucky enough to score a TRS-80,” he remembers, “and I immediately fell in love. Computer games were clearly the perfect fusion of creativity and technology, and my aspiration shifted almost immediately from writing to making games.” Like many keen early adopters, Mike began self-teaching himself coding, and used various summer jobs to fund the purchase of an Atari 800 and then an IBM PC. “I created a lot of early games, and switched my academic focus to anything to do with computers.” Having already started his own business in 1985 that specialised in helping other companies switch to the fast-incoming and flexible PC, Mike one day received a fateful call. “I needed to hire programmers for Challenge,” explains Bob. “I couldn’t actually code my games. Mike was running his company, Paragon, and I contracted him and two of his engineers, who did the bulk of coding for my two Infocom games.” Having never lost his love of videogames, Mike Verdu jumped at the chance to work in the industry as Mark Poesch and Duane Beck were co-opted into Challenge to develop its first two games. Sherlock: The Riddle Of The Crown Jewels and Arthur: The Quest For Excalibur were released by Infocom in 1988 and 1989 respectively, both part of an overarching series known as Immortal Legends. Unfortunately, events at their publisher overtook Bob’s plans for the historical series.
After its early successes, Infocom had experienced a turbulent period, including an acquisition by Activision in 1986. As one of the most popular and innovative videogames companies of the early Eighties, it had made millions of dollars with the Zork franchise in particular. But the market was changing and competition from rivals such as Sierra and Lucasarts was fierce.“infocom shut down its Cambridge office in the May of 1989 and by the end of that year, Legend was up and running,” remembers Bob. Initially, the new company was to be known as Gameworks, and was even briefly incorporated under that name, until upon attempting to get a trademark, Bob discovered the ambiguous moniker was already taken. “A company called Borland had a little-known
product with the same name. They wouldn’t give it up, so we needed a new one. We liked Legend, because we wanted to focus on storytelling, and once my wife had designed our shield logo, we never looked back. It was a better name anyway.”
legend began with Bob as its president and Mike Verdu as chairman; its financial backing would come primarily from an unlikely source, defence contractor American Systems Corporation.
“ASC had acquired my little software company in 1988,” explains Mike, “and provided most of the startup funding for Legend. Why did they do this?
With the Cold War winding down, the writing was on the wall for the US defence budget, which made companies like ASC very interested in opportunities for diversification.” Mike and Bob successfully persuaded the contractor that funding a videogame company would be an excellent expansion strategy, and Legend’s offices were situated within a building owned by the corporation. Joining Legend was Mark Poesch as a part-time programmer. “When Legend began the web was not a thing, and the games industry not the rockstar-minted industry it has become,” he remembers. “I was sceptical of the opportunity as a full-time occupation, so in the early days I remained full-time at ASC and contracted to Legend.” Having already worked on the aforementioned Infocom games, Mark was ideally placed to help Legend establish its foothold in the market.
Despite the demise of Infocom, Bob and Mike firmly believed in the genre that had made it famous. “Our belief was that there was still a market for adventure games,” Bob says, “and we wanted to make parser-driven games because we believed – and still believe – that they offer a type of gameplay that is unique to the industry. Players can talk to the game in ways that aren’t possible in other genres, and this often results in a close connection with the author.” Nevertheless, Legend had to look forward as well, and designed a new mouse-driven interface, added graphics, and hoped it could compete with the likes of Sierra and Lucasarts. “The business strategy at Legend was clear,” remembers Mike. “We were going to make high-quality text adventures for the niche audience that had been abandoned by Infocom. We’d increase the accessibility of the games with great art and a menu-input system in the hope of drawing in a
“THERE WAS STILL A MARKET FOR ADVENTURE GAMES” Bob Bates
larger audience over time.” An important development was the securing of Steve Meretzky as an independent contractor. “Steve is one of the funniest writers of our generation,” says Bob, “regardless of what medium he worked in. We were looking for fun romps through a comical fantasy world, I knew him from my work at Infocom, and his Spellcasting games were exactly what we were hoping for.”
Steve and Bob began work on Legend’s first games, Spellcasting 101 and Timequest respectively. While both firm adventure games, their themes and tone could not have been more diverse. “In an adventure game, 90 per cent of what the player does is wrong,” explains Bob. “So you as a designer have to entertain the player while they are struggling to solve the puzzles.” In addition, there was every adventurer’s favourite pastime – testing the game’s reaction to, err, alternative phrases. “Yes, lots of players like to challenge authors with off-the-wall responses,” laughs Bob. “And I always enjoy rising to that challenge and writing funny responses to the improbable inputs.” In Bob’s sci-fi epic, Timequest, the player was tasked with chasing a criminal throughout the world and time; meanwhile, Spellcasting 101, in the tradition of its designer’s former output such as Leather Goddesses Of Phobos, the fantastical element was combined with a certain bawdy nature. “I was a little shocked initially at how raunchy the humour was in Spellcasting 101,” recalls Mike. “At one point I thought, ‘Oh my God, are we really doing this?’ In hindsight, it’s quite tame, but back then the industry was quite conservative, and we were conscious our funding was coming from a defence contracting company with some pretty stern ex-military guys running its operations!” However, despite the occasional mild enquiry from ASC, Legend’s backing were very supportive of the developer, ex-nuclear submarine commanders and all.
From the early days of adventure games, it had enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the printed word. The Hobbit (Melbourne House, 1982) had forged the way for games based on books, a path that Legend took after the moderate success of its first two games; the strategy would prove to be a vital one. “Each of our designers had their favourite authors,” explains Bob, “so we started contacting their agents and the process was pretty simple back then. It was the beginning of the cross-media era so many of them were curious about this new idea, seeing their worlds
represented in interactive fiction.” Consequently, while the cost for these licences was originally low, it steadily rose as the awareness of PC gaming as a games platform increased. The first person to see their work on-screen from Legend was sci-fi author Frederik Pohl. Written by Glen Dahlgren and Mike Verdu, both Gateway and Gateway II: Homeworld were based loosely on the books, and used the established Legend text adventure engine, with a few modifications to help bring the Heechee universe into interactive fiction.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, a new technological expansion was about to have a huge impact on Legend’s business model, as Mike explains. “While we were never exactly rolling in money, our games sold well enough that we didn’t have to take on any additional funding in those first few years; we were able to grow our staff and improve our core technology.” Legend’s games had carved a decent niche in the market, albeit one that was soon to disappear with the advent of the CD as a method of storage. “As far as we were concerned, the CD-ROM revolution was actually a nightmare,” continues Mike. “On one hand, we were suddenly able to deliver very high-quality graphics and audio, levelling up the production values of the games exponentially. This was creatively very liberating. But what most people don’t remember about that time was that the market caught the attention of Hollywood, the huge media, toy and book companies. Money flooded into CD-ROM game development, like a precursor to the dotcom boom. Production costs shot skyward as everyone competed for resources and projects with CD-ROM often had budgets ten times what we were investing in ours. It was a disaster.” Despite the cost, the result was a glut of poor FMV games, as well as quality adventures, that threatened to extinguish companies such as Legend. “It was a blessing and a curse,” concurs Bob. “While we no longer had to ship games on multiple floppy discs, I believe it helped contribute to the demise of adventure games as a genre.” Now, legions of artists were required to satisfy the consumer demand for the range of colourful graphics that the medium could house. “We responded by becoming more graphicsfocused ourselves,” continues Bob, “but with the cost far outstripping the money we could make, it was clearly the beginning of the end.”
Companions Of Xanth, another lighthearted adventure, based loosely on the novel Demons Don’t Dream by Piers Anthony, marked the point at which CD-ROM began to take over, with the game released on both CD and floppy disc. Mark Poesch recalls,
“In the early days it was about bringing the story and puzzles to life. The music and artwork created a mood, but they were secondary, as evidenced by the graphic window which occupied the top-right quarter of the screen. The move to the Xanth engine was a very exciting time though; we spent many lunchtimes discussing the user interaction, debating the viability of maintaining a text parser and input mechanism, while at the same time eliminating keyboard input entirely.”
Despite its use of 320x200 MCGA resolution graphic the responsibility of artists ballooned, while the whole concept of voice production arrived. “We were still in an ultra-primitive era, light years away from the transition towards movie-making,” continues Mark. “But the graphics, sound, voice and music were bringing the games to life in a way that marked an important step forward.”
As with the rapid change of the 8-bit market ten years earlier, the videogame landscape was terraforming again. Bob and Mike began negotiating publishing deals in order to keep their company afloat.
“Legend was a publisher, which is to say we handled all aspects of the business up until the games were delivered to retail,” Bob explains. “We developed, duplicated, wrote and printed the manuals, designed and created the boxes, created the finished goods which were loaded onto pallets and delivered to the warehouse of our distributor.” Distribution was the critical challenge, and with development costs rising inexorably, agreements with Microprose and Accolade affiliate label programs helped keep the games coming. When, in 1995, publisher Random House invested in Legend, it appeared the CD-ROM boom storm had been ridden. A new generation of complex graphic adventures such as the beautiful Shannara, and the sleek Michael Dorn-starring Mission Critical appeared, usually based on works by Random House authors. “But the sales for these products were not high enough to offset the arms race in production values,” says Mike. Random House, nervous of the spiralling developing costs, withdrew from the world of interactive fiction. Legend’s next step was to find another investor, this time GT Interactive, publisher of the monster hit, Doom. “[GT] were already distributing some of our products, and we were already doing development work for Epic,” recalls Bob. “So it made sense to consolidate the relationship.”
To begin with, this relationship continued to flourish, despite a change of genre direction for Legend. By 1998, adventure games were being pushed aside by the incredible popularity of first-person shooters. “I had mixed feelings about that,” says
Bob. “On one hand it was hard to watch as adventure games became less popular. But it was exciting to take our expertise in storytelling and puzzle design into a whole new genre.” Legend used the hidden similarities between the genres – presenting the player with a challenge via a puzzle and solution, and creating worlds in which their actions make sense and entertain – to produce The Wheel Of Time, a fantasythemed FPS based on the series of books by Robert Jordan. In a crowded genre, Legend’s Glen Dahlgren designed a refreshing game that drew plaudits, if not stellar sales. “Glen led the push towards Unreal tech,” remembers Mark, “and I recall being blown away by their Unreal demo. Tim Sweeney [Epic cofounder] sent us a copy of the source code and we got our hands on Unrealed. It was a magical time.” The ambitious vision for The Wheel Of Time impressed and terrified in equal measure. “It was a huge struggle,” continues Mark, “but the compromise vision was ultimately successful in realising many of Glen’s original ideas.” Unfortunately, 1999 proved to be a dismal year for Legend’s new owner, culminating in GTI itself being acquired by Infogrames in the last quarter of the year. Mike remembers, “I felt good about the sale to GT; but was less happy about the subsequent sale to Infogrames. Bob and I had a series of bosses around the world. It was a very strange time.” In 2001, Mike left Legend, convinced the corporate environment was not a place for him to achieve his best work.
Legend’s final game was the sequel to Epic’s oft-forgotten FPS, Unreal. By then, Infogrames had rebranded itself as Atari. “Atari was a fragmented company, with decision making split between France and New York,” reveals Bob. “After Unreal II came out, we helped some of their other studios as we pitched our own projects to executives on both sides of the Atlantic.” Unfortunately, none of Legend’s proposed games appealed to either group of suits. After shipping the Unreal II multiplayer expansion, Atari concluded the final quarter of 2003 had been too disappointing, and closed Legend down.
“The early days were the best,” concludes Bob. “We had successes, we had fun and we had a good business model. As the industry changed, everything became more complicated and harder. We had a talented team and they worked well together; there’s a lot of dysfunction in the industry, but that rarely surfaced at Legend. Our people were smart, dedicated and talented, and our games reflect that. Legend was a true success story, not just for the games we made, but for the culture we were able to maintain.”
“I Recall BEING Blown Away By [EPIC’S] UNREAL demo” Mark Verdu