Blizzard Merges With Vicarious Visions, The Company Behind Tony Hawk And Crash Bandicoot Remakes

What a bloody shame

Dang, so this kind of officially confirms that TH 1&2 aint coming to the switch eh?

Oh f**k off. Horrible news. One of the most talented companies out there in a really promising place.

Well, if we extrapolate this trend of companies merging and being acquired as technology advances, then by the time games are genuine alternate realities, every company will have had to merge together to be able to make games lol!

'This cup asset took a team of 50 people, 6 years to create. This bar venue has almost 1000 cups.'

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO THE SHREK GAMES

... Well that sucks.

I really liked Vicarious Visions for over a decade while the only Blizzard game that has ever interested me is Overwatch. So, I guess this is it then.

Every time there is a buyout or a merger of a successful company I am disappointed, it only means we'll see less creative variety.

Vicarious Visions made one of my favorite computer games (that nobody has ever heard of): Terminus (it's a space sim).

This constant merger-ing into mega-corps means that (like EA) nobody will be interested in making a game unless they get "at least (this) amount of profit" and annual revenues from micro-transactions. As @Tourtus said, we will see less creative variety...

Another one bites the dust. RIP

Big companies swallowing smaller companies.

But I guess even Miyamoto's golden generation has to be replaced by fresh talent somehow...

Just as Crash was finally back in action and doing a fairly decent job this happens 😩
Rest in peace again, Crash 😢

Come on people you need to be happy for the Blizzard owners! They'll be able to make even more money and they've gotten rid of competition so they've gained even more unaccountable power within the industry. Yes that was sarcasm.

Yes, even more concentration of resources is exactly what the world needs right now. /s

@Jakiboy Crash should be fine. They just did the remakes. Toys for Bob did 4 and 4 is really good.

@Lone_Beagle Nope, you're not alone! I was playing Terminus on MacOS (classic?) at the beginning of the 2000's. Having completely missed the Elite era of the late 80's-early 90's, I was playing the Escape Velocity games (pretty much 2D Elite) for the rest of the 90's, and then found Terminus in the bargain section of an electronics store. It was an awesome experience to say the least, and I loved the controls even though it took some getting used to (and yet I can't get a grip on Flight Assist: OFF in Elite Dangerous for some reason). One day I want to hook up my old G3 tower again (now with a G4 processor upgrade) and go through the other faction storylines.

RIP Vicarious Visions

Huge gut blow. They did fantastic work on that Crash remaster

Oof. No thank you.

RIP Vicarious Visions

Wow.
This shortly after the news about Microsoft swallowing Bethesda.

I needa lie down.

Ok, people here need to understand that Blizzard already owned VV, they’ve just turned them into a support dev instead of a lead dev. That’s the story here and a damn shame. There wasn’t any buyout and VV were making great games even while already owned by a mega corporation.

“2020 was the worst year ever” people said. “2021 can’t be worse”

2021 - “hold my beer”

Terrible news this

@Lone_Beagle
I own and played Terminus, too, as it was the only good Elite-type game of that time, at least for the Mac. I imported the US Edition to Europe, as it has all three versions (Mac, Windows & Linux) in one package.

@nessisonett
Not entirely how it worked, but close enough.
Activision bought Vicarious Visions all the way back in 2005. Activision Blizzard wasn't formed until 2008, and Vicarious Visions was never reshuffled to be a division under Blizzard Entertainment until... yesterday.

But yeah, the Bala Brothers left five years ago anyway, as very wealthy men.

@Pod Yeah, VV came with the territory when Activision were bought by Blizzard. It’s more that the story isn’t that VV were bought by a large company as that was true about 3 generations ago.

ugh....really awful news

that confirms that tony hawk's 1+2 won't make it to switch

@nessisonett
True that. But just to clarify, Blizzard didn't buy Activision. The two companies merged, and just like all Activision's other studios, Vicarious Visions remained a separate entity.

But yeah. It's old news that they were bought. And I suppose we should have seen this new development coming, when VV's founders left in 2016, and the studio was put on remake duty.

@Pod @Tasuki Ahh right of course, I totally forgot about Vivendi!

GET THE GUN, bc I need to shoot myself this is One of the worst things ever, Blizzerd is going to ruin it, I hate bigger compenys buying the smaller one and then turning them into sh*t just like popcap Ea ruinde it.

So no more them, that's a shame, they made some of the best remasters for last gen.

@Snatcher Sadly we seem to be in an era of mega-corporations monopolizing everything and buying up all the presence and influence in the tech industry in general.

@Casual_Gamer95 @pixelpatch why do you think that?

@JayJ Why cant they just leave them alone Like Nintendo buying next level games, makes sense they make alot of the LM games but stuff like funmation buying crunchyroll, crunchyroll in just fine I have used it for years and now funmation rolls around and now trying to mootch of there tech but just wait its going to turn into another bad made funmation program

@Snatcher Yeah that sort of thing has been happening a lot lately, it's what I was saying, this is just some ugly period of mega-corporate dominance in the tech/entertainment industry. Expect the quality to continue to drop for a while.

@JayJ

I feel as though that already happened in the 90’s and those mega monoliths divested their tech and entertainment assets long ago. The largest businesses involved in tech are actual tech companies. Many are public, for sure, but none that I know of are the slave of some god awful holding company.

Since I enjoyed, especially the humor of, the Skylanders games this nail in the coffin is kind of sad. Were the toys overly expensive, did they abuse their system by making previous toys les powerful, did the games get incrementally worse after the second installment... Yes. But I enjoyed them all the same, and got all the toys on deep discount.

Much better than them going to EA!

@stevep So you prefer them being disolved and never making any more games to them going to EA? Not sure that's the best plan but eh. Can't really argue it.

Great, now their games are gonna suck

“Great job reviving two classic series for modern audiences and making boatloads of money in the process. Now go make some Overwatch skins, Blizzard owns you now.”

@Okapi - This in a nutshell, which is a shame given how well received N. Sane Trilogy and Pro Skater 1+2 were.
On the plus side, there's now a slightly higher chance that Blizzard's next attempt at a Warcraft/Diablo remake might not turn out as bad as Reforged.

Blizzard gave me the definitive D3 version at 60fps on switch. Maybe we’ll get a solid version of that THPS2 remaster everyone else got🦴

Vacarious Vision made terrible Crash Bandicoot and Spyro games, Toys for Bob made good Crash Bandicoot and Spyro games. Toys for Bob are more respectful of Naughty Dog and Insomniac Games works than Vicarious Vision, Activision, and Universal who just use the Crash and Spyro brand for the sake of making money.

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/91ead2c5-f838-4aa5-9384-01fd8e2614d4

Companies getting swallowed up and up and up. It benefits companies not gamers.

Does this mean blizzards games will get better, or vicarious visions games will get worse?

Say hello to the world of video game centralisation. It happened in the media and music industries decades ago and look how it turned out for them. No funding for decent rock music and no more politically neutral papers with actual investigate journalism.

Gaming is screwed.

I really miss the old blizzard. Playing Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3 were some of my best times in gaming.

Vicarious Visions made the excellent Tony Hawk 2 GBA, which I honestly loved more than the console versions.

To me, if I saw Vicarious Visions' logo on a game, I always trusted it was gonna be a good port.

All things must pass. Pour one out, they had a great run.

SH*T, This pretty much deconfirms the possibility of any future skylanders games.

What an absolute waste.

@nessisonett It was more like Activision bought Blizzard and later became “Activision Blizzard.”

Oh this is ass. They did an amazing job with the remasters. THPS really impressed me it plays and feels exactly like the third entry.
What a shame.

Hope no jobs are lost over this.

@Yanina because activision hasn't released nor announced something for the switch for a while now. It's pretty clear they're already moving on. With next gen being here, they'll just shove nintendo aside completely and start working on multiple next gen upgrades.

In 10 years China will own half of the game developers and the other half will have to abide to a set of Chinese made guidelines if they want to sell their games in China (wich like Hollywood, they will).

Toys 4 Bob have done the Switch version of Crash Bandicoot remake and recently Crash 4. Crash should be fine. Also THPS could still be coming to Switch.

Wow. This has blown my mind.

I’m talking about the comments, not the news. Have we lost all sense of proportion? All those creative people within VV will still exist within Blizzard, which now has an extra bunch of staff to find work for. This doesn’t have to change anything. It might, sure - but give it a minute first.

(Not like it’s EA...)

@vanYth @masterLEON Wow, glad to hear others enjoyed it...I actually got the full copy of Terminus from a UK dealer, sent to me in the US! I keep a copy running on a Win7 machine, and on my current Mac using CrossOver...sadly, the Windows version is easier to use now than the Mac version.

If you ever fire it up again, I could potentially use my Win7 machine as a server! lol

Here is a great abandonware site, if anybody is interested:
https://macintoshgarden.org/games/terminus

@Lone_Beagle @masterLEON
Ah, I remember it came on 3 CDs; the third had the soundtrack, so I used my internal drive for the game CD and my external CD writer for the soundtrack CD to have music ingame
I always felt the space stations were much too empty, in look as in sound...