So, the story so far :
The Tilt article mentions a development by Westwood and a release date anticipated for summer 1992. We know this was never to come, so we speculated on the whys :
I remembered (although couldn't find the source, it was in a french magazine) an interview of one of Westwood executives at the time of the release of Lands of Lore saying that Lands of Lore was originaly a very different game that they reworked to be closer to Eye of the Beholder because of engine problems. Alegedly, they kept the story and most of the gameplay elements but had to completely redo the engine and graphics.
At this point, a good bet was that Legacy of the Necromancer may have been that "very different game".
A second thought was context-based : 1992 was the year Westwood cut its D&D ties with SSI and was bought by Virgin Interactive. Another possibility was thus that Legacy of the Necromancer may have been a game discarded by the budget cuts made the Virgin buy/SSiI session. It may also have explained the Lands of Lore rework : maybe they didn't have the money to fix the incomplete engine and had to resort to one they already have.
Knowing that the original dispute between SSI and Westwood was about the third Eye of the Beholder and they wanted to make a dungeon crawler that was less limited by the D&D ruleset and that they wanted to make Lands of Lore a series of eight games (which were never to be, because EA...), that was a very legitimate possibility.
Then Joseph B. Hewitt entered the discussion with real insight : he was Senior Artist and Designer at Westwood.
To quote Joseph himself :
This game was not from Westwood. I've never seen or heard of it before. SSI took over Eye of the Beholder franchise when we were bought and merged into Virgin Games, though we did help them with EoB III. We went ahead with Lands of Lore. I don't remember there being another vision for it, though I do remember that we we conerned about the real 3D games that were starting to come out, notably Ultima Underworld, which is why we added the fake turning illusion at the last minute.
So, if it wasn't a Westwood game, then *who* ?
From
reports on abandonware-france.com, we found that Legacy of the Necromancer was presented at both CES conventions in 1992 (Summer in Chicago and Winter in Las Vegas), both times at the Virgin stand. So it *was* a Virgin edited game. What we can't find, however, is if the game was developped in-house or not, and by who exactly.
At that point, the best guess as far as the Tilt article was concerned was to assume that Tilt simply thought all Virgin RPGs on the stand were from Westwood, and made the wrong call.
Whatever the reason, the game was indeed
in the 1992 Virgin catalog.
The other magazines mentioned as sources on the abandonware-france pages weren't much help, only confirming what we already knew : Legacy of the Necromancer is a Virgin game, it was presented in a playable state, but somehow vanished.
Back to the "budget" idea, one possiblity is that the game was developed internally by Virgin, and dropped when the company got the deal with Westwood. The dates may work, giving Legacy of the Necromancer was suposedly late by summer 1992 (it appears to have been shown in a still-beta form in Las Vegas, at a time it was supposed to have already been released if we are to believe the Tilt article) and that Lands of Lore was released in January 1993. But if it is so, there's still a big blank on the "why", especially considering that there was another RPG edited by Virgin around that time (Warriors of Legend, a late-1993 release that was presented alongside Legacy of the Necromancer in Las Vegas).
). Haven't found anything new yet.
