One of the most anticipated new action games in development is New Legends from Infinite Machines, a company started by two ex-LucasArts employees, Justin Chin (project leader on Jedi Knight) and Che-Yuan Wang.  This third person action game with an Asian flavor was shown to a select few at this year’s E3 – it was one of our seven best games at the show -- but has since disappeared from the radar map.

Now we know why.  This morning in Las Vegas, THQ announced it would publish the game, picking it up from GT Interactive.  The other big news is that New Legends will no longer be released on the PC, but is instead being geared as an Xbox-only title for late 2001 release. In light of these new developments, Geoff Keighley sat down with Justin Chin to discuss to state of New Legends.

Geoff: Hi Justin, thanks for your time.  We know that shortly after E3, Infinite Machine and GT Interactive/Infogrames decided to go separate ways.  What was it like for the team during this time period?  Was the game ever at risk of being cancelled or the team running out of funding?  How did you keep going?

Justin: It was definitely a stressful time for the whole company. To be honest, Che-Yuan Wang (IM’s Chief Technical Officer and my business partner) and I were sort of relieved to be free of GT. You could say that they were going in a different direction than what we wanted. There were many promises that they made that they didn’t fulfill. They strung us along on many, many issues and in the end, we were sick of it. Certainly no love lost there.

After that initial euphoria, everyone in the company buckled down and set their minds on E3 and pitching the game to other potential publishers. The team was incredible during the hunt for a publisher. Everyone did what they could to help out and get us through the to the end.

Geoff: We've heard time and again from publishers that PC games aren't selling what they used to sell.  Was that a common theme when you were shopping New Legends around to publishers?

Justin: There seem to be two different aspects that tend to have a negative effect on product in general – decrease of sales, and the need to increase budgets. Those issues alone were, and will be, the defining issues for publishers and Infinite Machine. Publishers were and are straying away from the PC arena. PS2, Xbox, and the future Nintendo system were on everyone’s mind and the sales averages on consoles leave the PC with something to be desired.

Moving into console development was our plan for Infinite’s future. We were even thinking that if we were to do a NL sequel we would launch it on a console. As we talked to publishers it became clear that we would be moving into the console market very rapidly.