Demonware founder Dylan Collins has gone live with his new online browser game Legends of Zork, and his publishing company Jolt has established offices in Dublin, Los Angeles and Germany.
Collins, who sold Demonware to Activision two years ago for around €15m, has published Legends of Zork in tandem with Activision Publishing.
Legends of Zork (LoZ) has finished its testing period, and has now been released to run wild and free on the internet at www.legendsofzork.com
“We’ve designed LoZto be as accessible as possible, hoping to appeal to both original Zorkfans (and there’s enough of them working on this that we should know what we’re talking about), while also trying to bring in a whole new generation of players”, said Collins, CEO of Jolt Online Gaming.
“We appreciate that Zorkis a hallowed franchise, and we have tried our very best to keep within the spirit of the game and pay it the reverence it deserves, while also making some obvious changes to open it up to a wider audience.
“We don’t know if this approach will make us the most celebrated company in the world, or if we’ve just earned ourselves a whole lot of hate mail, but whatever the result, that’s the balance we’ve tried to strike.
“We’ve also made it as accessible as possible in a very literal sense, in that we’ve designed it to be played in your internet browser, at home, in school, in the office.
“Personally I can’t imagine a better use of a smart phone than to thrash a giant Kobold while on my exercise bike at the gym,” Collins added.
Already, Jolt Online Gaming is one of the leading browser games publishers in the world. Its games include the trucking RPG known as Trukz.com, the eagerly anticipated UtopiaKingdoms.com, and the cult favourite Swirve.com.
By John Kennedy
