Games - The Silver Lining

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	Games - The Silver Lining

The Silver Lining (TSL), originally titled King's Quest IX: Every Cloak Has a Silver Lining (KQIX), is an unofficial continuation to the King's Quest series created by fans. It is being developed by Phoenix Online Studios (POS), and promises to be one of the most professional fangames to date. TSL has grown to be one of the largest (if not the largest) fangame projects when measured by team membership.

Although TSL is usually considered to have officially started after its reconstruction in 2002, the original team working on the game was created in October of 2000. After a long period of limited production and loss of focus, the original TSL team began to fall apart. The modern TSL team was created in January of 2002 under the supervision of César Bittar (previously one of the writers, he is now the designer and director of TSL). Dividing the production crew into five departments (Art, Design, Music, Programming, and Public Relations), he made POS into an efficient working unit. Little of the original plot has been kept, so its resemblance to the original team's concept of TSL is limited.

In review of the King's Quest series, it had gained a lot of fans as each new game came out--King's Quest VI and King's Quest VII being the most popular. However, Sierra Entertainment tried taking adventure gaming into a new world when they released King's Quest: Mask of Eternity in 1998. Fully 3D, the game involved more than just puzzles. In fact, its gameplay was heavily based on a fighting system. Once reaching the end of the game, players were rewarded with a very anticlimactic ending movie. This left fans of the King's Quest series disappointed to say the least. Within a couple years, Sierra Entertainment switched its main focus onto different genres of computer games. Fans of the King's Quest series were left out in the cold. This is where POS came in. Scratching the fighting system and going back to the roots of adventure gaming, this group of fans was determined to give closure to every last King's Quest fan and, hopefully, spark a new interest in the adventure gaming genre. The game will have a completely original story. Not only that, it will feature 3D graphics, completely original musical scores, sounds, and voice acting.

Vivendi

From its inception, the KQIX project pursued its ambition to give closure to the King's Quest series with the belief and assertion that the project was legal under U.S. fair use copyright law, though acknowledging that this was a legal gray area. Notwithstanding this position, they maintained a notice on their site promising to shut down the project if confronted by Vivendi Universal, the owner of the King's Quest license. As it turned out, after over four years of development and immediately after releasing their first trailer and announcing a release date, POS was sent a cease-and-desist email from Vivendi. POS kept their word and immediately halted all development on the project as they entered negotiations with Vivendi.

As soon as the news was made public, fans of the game and the series began a mass mailing and e-mailing campaign to persuade Vivendi to allow POS to complete the project. Thanks to the public relations efforts by POS, the quality of the work completed so far, and the ardent outcry from the fans of the project, development was allowed to resume. Vivendi only required that the title be changed to remove the "King's Quest" reference; all characters, locations, art, story, plot, and script content will be unchanged.

Release dates

The Silver Lining will be released as a trilogy. The first part will focus mainly on King Graham, the second will change the focus to Alexander and Rosella, and the third will focus on all three characters.

Part 1: Shadows – originally scheduled to be released in Winter 2005/2006; now pushed back (because of the halt in production) to sometime later in 2006.

Part 2: The Two That Are One – scheduled to be released in 2007.
Part 3: Eternities – scheduled to be released in 2008.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for The Silver Lining ]

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