Telltale no longer planning King's Quest revival

Despite an announcement way back in the distant past of 2011, Telltale have today confirmed that they're no longer working on a revival of the Sierra adventure game classic, King's Quest. The statement was made after news came in that the licence had returned back to Activision, who are speculated to have their own plans for the series.

"While we deeply love King's Quest here at Telltale, we can confirm that we are no longer working on the franchise," said Telltale's Steve Allison, senior VP of publishing, in a statement to DigitalTrends . "There was a time last year that we investigated partnering with third party developers to produce the game as a partnership but decided against outsourcing. We are not privy to what plans Activision has for the franchise, if any."

The rumours that Activision have themselves got a plan for the licence come from Replay Games founder Paul Trowe, who is currently working on the Kickstarted HD remake of Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards. In a GDC interview with DigitalTrends , he mentioned that Sierra co-founder Roberta Williams was interested in working with him after Larry's completion, but that King's Quest was off the table.

"Activision's probably not going to give us the King's Quest rights," Lowe said. "[Telltale] had it, and we were going to license it from them to make the remakes. Then I talked to the guys at Activision and they were like, 'No, we're pulling it because we're going to do it ourselves.'"

While we don't yet know what those plans are, I'm assuming that King's Quest isn't going to work as a Call of Duty map pack.

Phil Savage
Editor-in-Chief

Phil has been writing for PC Gamer for nearly a decade, starting out as a freelance writer covering everything from free games to MMOs. He eventually joined full-time as a news writer, before moving to the magazine to review immersive sims, RPGs and Hitman games. Now he leads PC Gamer's UK team, but still sometimes finds the time to write about his ongoing obsessions with Destiny 2, GTA Online and Apex Legends. When he's not levelling up battle passes, he's checking out the latest tactics game or dipping back into Guild Wars 2. He's largely responsible for the whole Tub Geralt thing, but still isn't sorry.