If he just tore through to the end it wouldn’t be very good. I assume he takes time out to work on other things because he wants to stay creatively fresh. GRRM is certainly rich enough to just plough on and write all the Song of Ice & Fire books.
But there’s no other way to raise the funds, so I’m just going to have to bite the bullet. Marketing and all that businessy stuff appeals to me about as much as drain-cleaning. I’d need to run a Kickstarter to finance the art and production, and believe me the very thought makes my heart sink. That could be the long-planned Shadow King or it could be something else. If I don’t find any paid work after finishing my stint on the Vulcanverse books, my first priority is the Jewelspider RPG, but right after that I figure I may as well start writing a new gamebook. Paul Gresty is already working on Fabled Lands book 8. But it doesn’t have to be one or the other.
Obviously I’d rather work on my own thing than on somebody else’s IP, and you usually get a better book when the writer is free to let their imagination fly. They can afford to knock out five books – or rather, to finance Fabled Lands Publishing to do the books. The gamebooks are barely even small change to them, the equivalent of handing out bags with your brand logo on. The difference with Vulcanverse is that it’s funded by a multimillion-dollar company with blockchain transactions constantly pumping cash up its arm. And then we have to drum up cash to pay for artwork, a map and a cover. Even if we found a few spare months and wrote one, there’s also all the checking (oh, those flowcharts!), editing, and typesetting. The short answer is that the funds are simply not there to pay for everything required to do a Fabled Lands book. Why are you writing these instead of getting on with more Fabled Lands? 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.People have been asking about the Vulcanverse gamebooks (in a few cases even with a slight whiff of dudgeon) so I thought now would be a good time to answer a few FAQs. We'd be some kind of Final Fantasy franchise by now if we had."
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. 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. 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.