Next Generation has a great article up, 'Culture: Five That Fell.' "Companies come and go. That's life. But some live in the memory even, if not in actuality. We've picked five that blazed across the sky, then dimmed or disappeared..." It's a swell, nostalgic read.

I still remember the day Looking Glass Studios died. I was working in a small cubicle in Boston, aligning page numbers by hand on a five hundred page Powerpoint document, when I read on Blue's that they were closing down. I immediately called up to wish them my well wishes and offering to buy them all a beer, but my brief chance at meeting the guys who'd given me so many hundreds of hours of gaming pleasure was dashed when some affluent jerk sent them a case of fine imported brew, making my gesture impotent and pitiful in comparison.

There's a lot of companies like Looking Glass that have risen and fallen... most of the time a lot less dramatically than LGS, which just had the life support ruthlessly yanked from the wall socket. Companies like Sierra On-line, Atari and Origin are still kinda, sorta around, in a Terri Schiavo sort of way. Other companies like Black Isle and Looking Glass are dead, but live on through spiritual successors. Florian Eckhardt

Culture: Five That Fell [Next Generation]