Realm Interactive, the wholly owned subsidiary of NCSoft which purchased the rights to the 'trade wars' trademark, appears to have been disbanded and the exarchonline.com and realminteractive.com links are dead. Exarch itself, according to the link below, is 'on hold' and considering what happened with Trade Wars: Dark Millenium, how much do you want to bet that the game will never see an actual release?

Just posting this for the idly curious among us who have had some interest, however mild, in the ongoing saga of Realm Interactive's MMORPG efforts.

http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=50275

Here's the situation. I went to work with Realm on a 1 year contract when the game was still Trade Wars. About a month after I got there, they got a publisher, NCSoft, who did not value the Trade Wars license. By that time, actually, the game had deviated so far from any kind of Trade Wars gameplay that I was looking for ways that I could gracefully recover the rights to the game and continue to work with the new project (to gain experience, etc). So it was no shock when NCSoft/Realm dropped the Trade Wars name. As defined by the contract, that meant that Trade Wars rights reverted back to me, and I am now sole owner of Trade Wars (which is now a registered trademark) and have recently recovered http://www.tradewars.com as well.

Along with my efforts with TWv3 and the v4 I'm planning that will continue to use the v3 engine, I'm working on a more ambitious game design that I hope to sell to a developer, with the goal this time of maintaining a greater level of control over that design. My hope is that by presenting a game design package rather than just selling the name, the eventual project would more likely be something worthy of the Trade Wars name.

Anyway, as far as Realm goes, after I was there for 6 months, NCSoft forced Realm to fire all of the original employees from the startup, including me, and then a few months later, it shut down development on Exarch and bought out the company. In essence, NCSoft raided Realm for its technologies. Such is life in the corporate world of computer games!

But Trade Wars is back with me, and I'm very motivated to see it continue to grow, even though it has been very dormant for awhile now.

Hope this sheds some light on what's been going on!

a corporate raid? wow, like the one in the monty python movie? hehe. good ole monty python. but ya, corporate raids suck. atleast twars came back to you! that i am glad of.
Slim

quote:Originally posted by John Pritchett (EIS)

Here's the situation. I went to work with Realm on a 1 year contract when the game was still Trade Wars. About a month after I got there, they got a publisher, NCSoft, who did not value the Trade Wars license. By that time, actually, the game had deviated so far from any kind of Trade Wars gameplay that I was looking for ways that I could gracefully recover the rights to the game and continue to work with the new project (to gain experience, etc). So it was no shock when NCSoft/Realm dropped the Trade Wars name. As defined by the contract, that meant that Trade Wars rights reverted back to me, and I am now sole owner of Trade Wars (which is now a registered trademark) and have recently recovered http://www.tradewars.com as well.

Along with my efforts with TWv3 and the v4 I'm planning that will continue to use the v3 engine, I'm working on a more ambitious game design that I hope to sell to a developer, with the goal this time of maintaining a greater level of control over that design. My hope is that by presenting a game design package rather than just selling the name, the eventual project would more likely be something worthy of the Trade Wars name.

Anyway, as far as Realm goes, after I was there for 6 months, NCSoft forced Realm to fire all of the original employees from the startup, including me, and then a few months later, it shut down development on Exarch and bought out the company. In essence, NCSoft raided Realm for its technologies. Such is life in the corporate world of computer games!

But Trade Wars is back with me, and I'm very motivated to see it continue to grow, even though it has been very dormant for awhile now.

Hope this sheds some light on what's been going on!


I was in the closed beta of the game, before the publisher was brought in. And I was really hoping to be in the beta when Exarch went to beta.

And I'll say this, that game in it's original beta form. Was not remotely Tradewars. But, it was good as it was.

It's a shame that this has happened. But as you stated, it is the way in the corporate world.

And I would truely like to see your new Tradewars game. When you finally get it to the point of alpha/beta testing.

Looks like you got out of there by the skin of your teeth JP! Good job!

I think it would have been a major tragedy for a Corporation like the one you've described to end up controlling the Tradewars name!

Hi, I was the original sound guy on TWDM. I worked with the team starting in Nov of 2000 as a contractor from a remote location (I'm in CA they were in AZ) planning the audio needs and creating music and sound effects. I'd like to think that my ideas for the audio and my work on SFX and music helped them secure their deal with NCSoft. I had a deal with Sal and David from the start which would pay once they got a publishing deal. Shortly after NCSoft signed them they hired some comic book artist and made him creative director. In a meeting with him he admitted that he knew nothing about audio and would need to rely heavily on my expertise since he was put in charge overseeing the audio. Some new guy in the office lobbied heavily for his friend to do the audio and after 2 years of helping them out I was given the bums rush. I sent an invoice for the work I had done and they refered me to their lawyer. I wrote it off as a loss and put a "Bad Business Karma Mojo" on them... looks like it worked. [:P]

I always wondered who this phantom "sound guy" was It always seemed strange to me that they ignored this element of the design. As far as someone lobbying for someone else to take your position, I can assure you that everyone involved in the ground floor of the project, with the exception of Dave, Sal, and Brad, got the same treatment from NCSoft once they took over. I don't blame Dave or Sal for this, it's just business. But it does hurt when you invest so much effort on spec and as soon as the project attracts some major attention you get dumped. That's certainly something I would try to avoid at all costs if I found myself in a similar situation. That's all I will say

I still have the theme I wrote for them. Since I was never paid I still own the rights to it... If you are interested in it I can put it up on my website.

Did you get the email I sent you?

My head is spinning here. This thread is really hard to read when all the posts have been deleted. [xx(]