Legend Entertainment was a company founded by former members of Infocom, focusing on text adventures with static pictures to the side. Steve Meretzky was their most prominent writer. Many of their games were adaptations of popular SF&F books, usually faithful to the spirit, even if rather loose. Early games (Spellcasting, Timequest, Gateway and Eric the Unready) had a powerful parser, that also allowed to choose nouns and verbs from a large dictionary; subsequent adventures dropped the parser leaving only pointing-and-clicking (and greatly reduced the number of available actions), but featured much better graphics.
In 1998 the company was bought by GT Interactive and shifted focus to action games. They made a moderately successful first-person shooter The Wheel of Time, and then worked on the Expansion Pack Return to Na Pali for Unreal and the sequel Unreal II: The Awakening. In 2004 the studio was closed by its then-owner, Atari, the reason being that "Legend had recently completed its only current project and had no new projects in the pipeline", though it's widely believed that the catalyst for its closure was the poor critical and commercial reception of Unreal II.
Their games include
- Callahan's Crosstime Saloon, based on short stories by Spider Robinson.
- Companions Of Xanth, based on Xanth novels by Piers Anthony.
- Death Gate, based on novels by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman.
- Eric the Unready
- Gateway series, based on novels by Frederik Pohl.
- John Saul's Blackstone Chronicles: An Adventure in Terror, based on the John Saul novel series.
- Mission Critical
- Shannara, based on the "classic" Shannara trilogy by Terry Brooks.
- Star Control 3note
- The Spellcasting Series
- Superhero League of Hobokennote
- The Wheel of Time, set in the world of Robert Jordan's novels, but not canon.
- Unreal Mission Pack: Return to Na Pali
- Unreal II: The Awakening
