Update!!
History of Silicon Knights part 3
Blood Omen was a break out hit garnering positive reviews from critics of the time, and selling remarkably well for a 2D game on the new PlayStation console. Jeff Gerstmann at Gamespot gave it a 7.1 comparing it favourably to Beyond Oasis and Zelda, IGN gave it an 8.5, Electronic Gaming Monthly named it their RPG of 1997, beating out Suikoden, and citing the voice work, atmospheric FMVs and it’s mood. It is usually had to get concrete numbers about how well a game sold in the late 90s but thankfully Silicon Knight’s history is no stranger to litigation and in 2011 as a result of one such instance it was revealed that the game had sold at least 320,082 copies in it’s lifetime.
It had paid off, they’d put out their own game and made it a success. There was a PC port released late in 1997, which due to uncertainty about ownership, has never been re-released. During the launch period an enhanced Saturn port was announced, promoted with the PlayStation version and then disappeared. There’s conflicting reports about what happened to the port. One interview for SegaSaturn.com claimed the game was 100% complete but not being picked up by Activision due to an uncertain market for the Saturn. Silicon Knights would later refute the idea that it had been finished, saying it had been started and cancelled during 1997.
To be fair, Silicon Knights had their own problems to deal with outside of porting Kain to Saturn. During the release and success of Blood Omen, Activision had struck a deal with Crystal Dynamics to make a sequel to the game. Two teams would develop pitches for Kain 2, an internal Crystal Dynamics team, and Silicon Knights. Nothing is known about these proposals, largely as a result of legal action from Silicon Knights. Feeling they were going to lose their successful original IP and claiming that Crystal Dynamics had misrepresented themselves as developers of the game (remember, several members of CD’s staff did develop the game with Silicon Knights) they took the company to court over Blood Omen.
The only information we have from the pitches is that Crystal Dynamics wasn’t satisfactory to Activision, and Silicon Knights claimed Crystal Dynamics interfered with their pitch, leading to the court case. We do know that Dyack had intended to make Blood Omen a series and that Vorador would be the star of the new game. The meat of the law suit was as follows; SK entered into negotiations with CD to fund the game in exchange for the publishing rights. Under “financial duress” SK agreed to assign all of Silicon Knights’ intellectual property rights, including the rights to any derivative works, to CD. They claimed that CD had deliberately refused assistance that lead to the large delay in development, they had held off on paying royalties during development and had “secretly” solicited and employed third party contractors to “shadow” Silicon Knights in an effort to steal trade secrets and supplant SK as the developers of Blood Omen.
The suit was settled out of court. Crystal Dynamics would retain the rights they had been sold by Silicon Knights without contest, so long as they would credit Knights as the developers of the original game. Crystal Dynamics would retool a game in pre-production as a sequel to Blood Omen, and the Legacy of Kain series would continue. For Silicon Knights, it would end, and they would look to Dyack’s passion project. Too Human.
(Note: I’m going to cite my sources for these in the last segment but special shout out to noted Legacy of Kain fan and researcher Mama Robotnik for making the legal case easy to understand in his old Silicon Knights Post Mortem thread on neogaf.)