23 Sep, 2011
Bethesda’s requested restraining order against Masthead Studios’ Fallout MMO was denied. Which may sound strange, considering that Bethesda now owns the rights to the Fallout IP.
However, when Bethesda bought all of the rights to Fallout from Interplay, they sold back a contract to Interplay to develop a Fallout MMO with some contingencies. Now, Bethesda has alleged that Interplay has not kept up their part of the deal, thus nullifying the contract. Interplay obviously disagrees since the development of the Fallout MMO was farmed out to Masthead Studios, the Bulgarian developers who released the Earthrise MMO, earlier this year.
Gamasutra has a decent write-up of the whole affair, as well as some extra historical background.
I can understand where Bethesda is coming from. When they got the rights to Fallout, they probably had no way of knowing how successful the Fallout franchise would be. Allowing Interplay some basic Fallout MMO rights probably got Bethesda a decent discount on the whole deal. Now, after two fairly successful games, it seems reasonable that Bethesda would want to get ALL of the Fallout rights back.
Unfortunately, contract law can be a maze of twisty little passages, so Interplay may be totally within their rights to create a Fallout MMO.
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