Gathering Of Developers Didn't "Drop" Shadowbane, It Lost The MMRPG

by , 1:15 PM EDT, May 25th, 2001

In an interview with Gathering of Developers Producer Josh Galloway, the Mac Observer has learned details on why Gathering dropped the Massively Multiplayer Role-playing Game (MMRPG) Shadowbane. The interview also pointed toward some tangled lines of communication between the publisher and its parent company, Take Two Interactive.

"Everybody [at Gathering] loved the game," said Mr. Galloway. "The decision really came from Take Two. I guess I could say that it [Shadowbane] probably didn't fit within Take Two's strategy. I mean it definitely fit in with GoD-games [Gathering's] strategy, which is why we wanted to do the game in the first place."

Shadowbane is the eagerly anticipated role-playing game currently under development at Wolfpack Studios. It allows gamers to create a character that they lead from inexperience to great skill in an Internet world populated with other characters controlled by other gamers. Because of its scalable nature, this type of RPG is called "Massively Multiplayer." The PC has seen other MMRPGs before, such as the popular Ultima Online or Everquest, but Shadowbane was to be the first such title on the Mac. By all appearances, Shadowbane could have been a smash-hit.

So why did Gathering of Developers drop the title? "We didn't drop it. We really wanted to support the game.… We'd been working with the Wolfpack people for quite a while on the title, and things just didn't work out."

The fact that Gathering of Developers lost, rather than dropped, Shadowbane fortifies impressions that Gathering is still acclimatizing to being Take Two's subsidiary. "It's been a big year for transitions in the company—being owned by Take Two…. Things had to be rethought, and I'm sure that [dropping Shadowbane] was just part of the process."

But Mr. Galloway assures gamers that Shadowbane will arrive on the Mac, sooner or later. "I know that the Wolfpack guys will have absolutely no problem getting their game out; Mac fans will still be able to play on the Macintosh. As far as I know, it really hasn't been too detrimental to their development process, not having us as their US publisher…. They haven't had layoffs or anything."

The Mac Observer Spin:

Either Take Two Interactive has a very different agenda than Gathering did before its acquisition, or the staff at Gathering isn't getting the memo. In addition to the apparent confusion over why Take Two wanted to drop Shadowbane, we recently learned that Gathering is finished publishing for the Mac. Once Myth 3 is published, there will be no more Mac games from GoD, at least as of now. Rumor has it that Gathering's staff was actually the last to learn that Mac ports of its games would be licensed to Macsoft. If Gathering really learned that it was dropping the Mac from a press release, then communication between the publisher and its parent needs serious renovation.

Shadowbane