This autumn is without doubt the cruelest season that Babylon 5 fans have had to suffer through, and there's little good news on the horizon.
Late Monday, electronic game manufacturer Sierra confirmed gloomy industry whispers by canceling the upcoming Babylon 5 ship-to-ship combat game, Into the Fire, amid a general corporate reorganization. The company said the game, like other titles on the chopping block, "did not meet its success criteria."
Into the Fire had been on the drawing board for several years, over which time the original Babylon 5 series moved from general syndication to end its five-year scheduled run on the TNT cable network. The move cost the show many viewers and TNT reduced its orders for the spin-off series, Crusade, to 13 episodes, effectively crippling a storyline designed to unfold over an additional five years.
"The game is history"
It is unlikely that another game company would take on the now orphaned B5 game, given the complexity involved in transferring rights on the licensed material already completed, coupled with an apparent lack of interest in the project on the part of Sierra parent company Havas Interactive.
In open letter to B5 fans, an inside Sierra source blamed the cancellation on "a lack of support for the project internally and poor management decisions in the past," and warned that "emailing Havas/Sierra would be next to useless as ... they have made up their minds."
Previously, the game's developers had boasted that the game would have "raised the bar" for ship combat simulations, offering the capability to render 350 or more ships at once.
However, the programmers and other staff, two of whom had celebrated their first anniversary on the project only a day before, are now resigned to the game's fate, calling it "just history."
"We won't ever get to play it," they told fans on their unofficial Web site.
Sierra said it offered the development team and other employees laid off in the reorganization generous severance packages and the opportunity to take jobs in other branches of the company.
The hour of the wolf
The news was just another cold shoulder for the B5 franchise, which is arguably the second most successful work of science fiction ever attempted on U.S. television and one of the few real rivals to genre giant Star Trek.
Late last month, new episodes of Crusade came to an end, leaving fans bereft of fresh video material for the first time in over six years.
There are no unaired shows in the pipeline, and series creator J. Michael Straczynski has said he has "no new B5 projects in the works for the foreseeable future."
While the possibility of a theatrical film is still open, Straczynski is unlikely to schedule such a major project in such a way that it would compete with the Star Wars prequel series.
As he told the members of the B5 fan club, "I'd rather hold off on a B5 feature for a while."
The fan club, meanwhile, has scaled back its operations to better survive the long night to come. Publications and new memberships have been suspended for the duration, and membership fees will be refunded in the form of merchandise rebates.
Finally, the show, which at its peak won two Hugo awards for best SF dramatic presentation, was snubbed at this year's World Science Fiction Convention, losing the 1999 Hugo to the film, 'The Truman Show'.
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