SPECIAL – Shawn Mills, Infamous Quests

It’s the surprise special you didn’t know you wanted! Actually, you probably didn’t want it, but cut me some slack, will you? It’s been a while. It was, however, a surprise that I wanted when we decided to reconvene for a special off-season episode last month. We’re still working out what exactly season 4 of this

Continue reading SPECIAL – Shawn Mills, Infamous Quests

It’s the surprise special you didn’t know you wanted! Actually, you probably didn’t want it, but cut me some slack, will you? It’s been a while.

It was, however, a surprise that I wanted when we decided to reconvene for a special off-season episode last month. We’re still working out what exactly season 4 of this show will be, and Troels is busy with the Space Quest Historian podcast, to which Gareth and I are also contributing. And once we get all of that out of the way, we will presumably come out of near-hibernation to pester your auditory organs on a weekly basis.

The reason for getting together for this special was more depressing, though. Mid-July, Steven Alexander of Infamous Quests (“Quest for Infamy”, “Order of the Thorne”) announced in a blog post that the company will cease to exist following the release of the two games they currently have in production. It was a bit of a kick in the guts. Not only because we consider many of the Infamous Quests developers to be good friends of ours, but also because as fans of the adventure game genre, we had genuinely hoped this labour of love would succeed. When something like that happens, the first question to form in the back of your mind is something akin to “What the fuck is going on?”

It turned out that Shawn Mills, the other CEO of Infamous Quests (and a one-time guest on our spin-off show, “Open Crowd Source”) was very interested in helping us get to the bottom of that conundrum. In fact, Shawn took to the social media not long after the IQ’s announcement and voiced his disappointment with the way things had ended. His tweets, posts and what have you led to several further questions: why has “Order of the Thorne” only sold about 1,000 copies? Why does that number not correlate with the number of adventure game fans voicing their support for indie game developers on the ‘net? Was piracy a factor? Why the hell are people so hot under the collar for IQ’s long-cancelled remake of “Space Quest III”?

For the humble price of crushing one soul, I can add “responder of fan mail” to my resume!

So, with the promise of letting Shawn talk about anything and everything relating to IQ’s closure, that’s exactly why we secretly sat up a Skype call a couple of days ago. The poor guy had a cold, and it was 1 AM at his place when we started, but he pulled through until we had a two-hour bitching session about the current state of the adventure game scene.

So, yeah. It’s a long, opinionated listen. You can check it out on YouTube…

… or below this post.

I think it will be fair to say that some people may well feel wronged after listening to our ramblings. If you do, we welcome you to discuss the topic with us on any of the platforms we’re on. We would like to hear from you, because even Shawn’s valuable input did not put that initial question to rest: “What the fuck is going on?”

Finally, on behalf of all of us, I want to thank Shawn for putting up with us for two hours. This was a very fun conversation, and it reminded me that I can’t wait for Troels, Gareth and I to get the band back together. Till that happens, I’m off ruining the former’s life in the guise of an evil, cybernetic owl. Ta-ta, humans!