February 28th, 2010

To Our Fans:

In 2005, Phoenix Online Studios received a Cease & Desist letter from Vivendi Universal, the owners of the King's Quest IP, in regards to our work on The Silver Lining. We complied with the request, and over the months that followed, we were able to work out a non-commercial fan license with Vivendi that allowed us to continue our work on the game.

We have spent a lot of time recently reworking the material of The Silver Lining into episodic releases, with the first out of a planned five episodes completed, and submitted for review, and had hoped we would be able to bring our game to you, the fans, in the Spring of 2010.

Recently, however, ownership of the Sierra IP changed hands and became the property of Activision. After talks and negotiations in the last few months between ourselves and Activision, they have reached the decision that they are not interested in granting a non-commercial license to The Silver Lining, and have asked that we cease production and take down all related materials on our website.

As before, we must and will comply with this decision, as much as we may wish we could do otherwise.

We cannot say enough how much we appreciate the support we have had over these years from our fans. Without you, we would never have gotten this far. There would be no game to develop, and no one to develop it for. You have been amazing and steadfast, and we will always remember that and appreciate it more than we can say.

Sadly, after eight years of dedicated work and even more dedicated fans, The Silver Lining project is closing down.

What the future holds for us, as individuals or a team, we cannot say. We have an amazing development team, however, filled with talented and hard-working individuals, and we hope the teamwork and rapport we’ve developed won’t go to waste. We hope that when we do know what the future holds for us, our fans will be there to enjoy what we can give them still.

Again, thank you all so much for everything. This has been a long and crazy road, full of more twists than we could’ve anticipated, but more triumphs and wonderful memories than we could’ve ever hoped for. And for that, to all of you and to everyone on our team, we will always be grateful.



Thank You,

The Silver Lining Development Team

To the people wondering if Activision-Blizzard can do this...legally, I'm afraid they can. The contract the TSL-team went into with VU a few years ago could be terminated by either party at any time.

To the posters asking...the difference with AGD Interactive was the fact that by the time VU Games was taken over by Activision, KQ1VGA, KQ2+ and QFG2VGA were already out and even Activision probably realized that shutting down the official source would just result in a lot of unofficial mirrors. So we were allowed to keep going for the time being. (yeah, that last part was not my imagination, so if any of you fans are planning to write an angry letter to Activision...kindly focus on TSL and keep AGD Interactive out of it...it's too late for them to pull KQ1, KQ2 and QFG2, but I'd hate to see the site being ordered to close)

I knew how harsh Activision's ideas about their IP were and expected TSL's "review" to be a vicious tug-of-war to get it out, but I didn't think they'd pull the rug from under you at this stage. That word litigation set the hairs of my neck on end. I'm very sorry to hear this. I can't imagine a more anticlimactic way years of work can end. You've achieved a lot over the years. It's a shame this ends in such a downer.