Legend Entertainment

Legend Entertainment was an American developer of computer games, best known for their complex, distinctive adventure titles throughout the 1990s.

The company was founded in 1989 by Bob Bates and Mike Verdu after the end of Infocom. Their goal was to design interactive fiction in the Infocom tradition. Legend's first products were all illustrated text adventures, some of them designed by Infocom veteran Steve Meretzky. Starting in 1993, they switched to a new development system for graphic-only adventures. Several of their adventure games were based on book licenses, including Frederik Pohl's Gateway, Terry Brooks' Shannara, Spider Robinson's Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, Piers Anthony's Xanth, and Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's The Death Gate Cycle.

By 1994 games like Xanth and Eric the Unready gave Legend a reputation for comedy adventures. The company was acquired by GT Interactive in 1998 and began changing their focus to action games. They developed a first-person shooter based on Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time and finished the development of the second part in the Unreal series in 2002. Late in 2003, they released a free expansion for Unreal II: The Awakening, known as XMP (eXpanded MultiPlayer). In 1999, GT Interactive was purchased outright by Infogrames, who later acquired and rebranded themselves as Atari.

On Friday, January 16, 2004, Legend Entertainment was shut down. A brief press release from Atari cites that it was "purely a business decision", and that "Legend had recently completed its only current project and had no new projects in the pipeline."

Interactive fiction

 * Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All The Girls (1990)
 * Spellcasting 201: The Sorcerer's Appliance (1991)
 * Timequest (1991)
 * Gateway (1992)
 * Spellcasting 301: Spring Break (1992)
 * Eric the Unready (1993)
 * Gateway II: Homeworld (1993)

Graphic adventures

 * Companions of Xanth (1993)
 * Death Gate (1994)
 * Superhero League of Hoboken (1994)
 * Mission Critical (1995)
 * Shannara (1995)
 * Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (1997)
 * John Saul's Blackstone Chronicles (1998)

Other

 * Star Control 3 (1996)
 * Unreal Mission Pack: Return to Na Pali (1999)
 * Wheel of Time (1999)
 * Unreal II: The Awakening (2003)
 * Unreal II: eXpanded MultiPlayer (2003)
 * Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003, support developer for Black Ops Entertainment)

Reception
In October 1998, Greg Costikyan quoted Legend Entertainment's Bob Bates as saying that the company "typically sells 100,000-150,000 copies of the adventure games they release, with overseas sales basically doubling the total number sold."