![]() ![]() Head over to bit-tech for pictures and an in-depth account of the Abraxas MMO, including how World of Warcraft may have pinched its cartoony style. We'd be some kind of Final Fantasy franchise by now if we had." He has written more than two dozen choose-your-own style gamebooks, including the acclaimed Fabled Lands series with Jamie Thomson, with whom he co-created Dark Lord: The Early Years, and a Kirkus-star-winning interactive version of Mary. ![]() With remorse, he added: "I wish we'd got into computer games a lot earlier and that we'd done the Fabled Lands books at the apogee of the gamebook craze. Dave Morris is a British videogame designer, comic book creator, scriptwriter and UK best-selling author. Frankly, most publishers have been slow to recognize the potential of e-books that they can be much more than an old-fashioned book on a glowing screen. "We've just raised a six-figure sum and we're actively looking for the right partner. "We'll be reviving Fabled Lands and Abraxas, hopefully," said Thompson. They've got ambitious plans for iPad, too. The pair haven't given up, and are working on an iPhone port of the Fabled Lands books for release this summer. "Eidos just ran out of money and their internal development model wasn't working," said Thompson, who added that he's owed "a lot of gold coins" still. ![]() Ultimately Eidos' diminishing success meant support was pulled. Morris said the pair arrived at work one morning to find the project manager leading a coup to turn the game away from fantasy and towards "giant battling robots". "There was no real software process, and rarely much of a plan beyond: 'The game will be ready when it's ready.' It wasn't solely the team's fault the milestones they were being given were often dictated by people who wanted to see eye-candy rather than real, under-the-hood progress." "Many games in the late '90s were being developed without a design. " utterly broken," recalled Morris to bit-tech. Abraxas MMO was conceived, but sadly never birthed. Morris' and Thompson's idea got the green light and they began work, eventually ditching the Fabled Lands IP to avoid sticky legal matters. Face wizards, dragons, ghouls and scorpion-men - and use the rewards of your victories to rise to ever-greater heights of glory. Back then Eidos was riding a Tomb Raider tsunami, and the only competition was Ultima Online, EverQuest and Asheron's Call. The pair were hired to research making an MMO at the turn of the millennium. Fabled Lands game-book creators Dave Morris and Jamie Thompson have explained why their MMO adaptation never got off the ground at Eidos during the early 2000s. ![]()
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