Trying to play the game myself, I often got too nervous, worrying that some giant ant would be biting my hero’s butt and I’d die during the ten seconds it took my character to turn around.

It was my older brother’s game, and I watched him slog through castle corridors, sewers, caves, and other, suspiciously similar-looking caves, with great interest. What does Stonekeep mean to me? Well, as one of the first games I played on CD-ROM after years of no more than 16 colors of action on a 386 PC, it kinda blew me away. Sure, it had its strengths – atmospheric music, a very simplified user interface that allowed focus on exploration and combat, interesting graphics (digitized actors in monster suits!) – but a tile-based faux-3D game, in first person perspective, at a time when other games were offering free 3D movement and combat? Too little, too late, Stonekeep.īut forget all that. In the interview it's interesting that Fargo acknowledges the consoles trend, wasn't there general opposition within Interplay in the early 00s when Titus wanted to help establish the console side of things at Interplay?īut I agree with Fargo though, Interplay really didn't have much 'internally' to compete with Grand Theft Auto, Madden, 2K, etc that would guarantee multi millions unit sales every release without heavy licensing fees.What began as a simple tile-based dungeon crawler was swept up by ambition and pigheaded-ness, making what could have been a true classic into a long overdue, technologically disappointing odd duck that few remember. The only thing that either Fargo or Caen could have really looked towards was Shiny and Enter the Matrix (which sold over 5 million units under Atari in 2003 although the success didn't exactly do wonders for them either). The fact that Interplay is still around given everything that happened is a miracle itself.

There was a 5-7 year timespan between Interplay going public and Fargo leaving, I highly doubt he could have pulled a turn around given more time. If memory serves right, they weren't able to turn a profit until 2003ish under Caen but even that was by selling Shiny to Atari, Galleon to SCi, and I think there was a Baldur title around that time which did a million? Click to expand.Interplay began to go downhill since they went public on the Nasdaq.

For android instal Stonekeep