(re: Kq9) Since I’m a member of the unofficial KQ9 team, I thought I should comment a bit on this.
First of all, the game itself – if it will be completed according to current plans – will be awesome! Unlike Tierra, we’re developing our own game engine, so there’s lots of work to do but we’re also free to do more or less whatever we want. And the game design will be something really fresh and unique. Of course I cannot tell you more details at the moment. 😉
As for Sierra, their attitude to fangames has been ambiguous so far. To me it would seem sensible to have a consistent approach to them, but there’s no such thing it seems. The KQ7 fangame could indeed have been targeted only because there was an official KQ7 project in development. Tierra on the other hand has only produced remakes of old games so far, and the charts seemed to indicate that the release of KQ1VGA boosted sales of the then already old King’s Quest: Mask of Eternity, so it might be that while they really didn’t like what Tierra was doing, they decided not to contact them because there was economic profit in it. They could hardly gain much from taking legal actions against fans working for free. Indeed, they would be better off treating their fans well, like Sierra used to in the “good ol’ days”. But when you’re basically nothing but a a puppet under a huge conglomerate like Vivendi I guess it’s hard to keep a personal touch on your business…
Anyway, if Sierra would contact our team, I believe they would at least have the decency to warn us first. And if they do so, we might just change the name of the characters and locations in the game and release it anyway. At the very least, the ambition is not to give up on our game creation just because Sierra puts spokes in our wheels.
This whole thing makes me think of the PacMan/Jawbreaker lawsuit way back in 1981. It’s a funny thought to imagine us in a courtroom arguing that Sierra did more or less the same thing back then as we do today. 😉
