Black Isle Announcement Brings Interplay Back to Relevance for Length of Time Required to Read Press Release

This is a picture of me learning this news, from my point of view.

Genuine excitement was felt throughout the videogame blogosphere this week as Interplay announced the reformation of Black Isle Studios, the logo on the front of the box of beloved PC games from the 1990s such as Fallout, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment, followed moments later by a wave of bitter resentment as the blogosphere finished reading the press release and realized that Black Isle Studios, the group of human individuals who designed and coded those games would remain fired.

“It really feels like getting the band back together," says Interplay CEO Herve Caen, leading us all to believe that significant members of the Black Isle staff, such as Chris Avellone, J.E. Sawyer, or anybody we'd ever heard of would either be returning to the company where they did such great work, or that they would have heard one thing about it before yesterday when Interplay launched a hastily put-together website and a Twitter account with no posts. Of course, because the universe punishes us for even attempting to emerge from our cynical shells and hope that something good or interesting can happen in this pathetic industry, this turned out not to be the case. To a man, none of the former Black Isle employees who have stayed in the games business knew anything about what was going on.

The toughest nut to crack for bloggers and vloggers in this story is which "band" to compare Black Isle to: Guns 'n' Roses, Van Hagar, and Smashing Pumpkins were all hilarious choices, but were all contain at least one original member, giving them more credibility than what we know about Black Isle Studios 2012. The debate rages on.

And then our attentions turned to the games, which we all agreed after our little fit were the only thing that mattered, there was another brief period of relief when we decided that, at the very least, we could look forward to new entries in classic series, and that would hold our interest for a short while. The press release stated that they would "bring to market new AAA innovative RPGs based on Interplay’s critically acclaimed intellectual properties." That sounds great! Nothing wrong with that, right? The only thing that I have to say against that is that every single game that the original Black Isle ever made has either been sold (Fallout to Bethesda. Interplay doesn't even have the MMO rights that they were clinging to for way too long) or was licensed from Wizards of the Coast in the first place (all of their other games were based on D&D).

So, we basically don't know. How can you put out a press release with less meaning than this? The VGXpert will keep on top these developments, so you don't have to wrinkle your pretty little forehead thinking about it.