Bethesda and their parent company Zenimax Media have announced that a settlement has been reached in their ongoing court case against Interplay over the rights to make a Fallout MMO. Bethesda have essentially won the case, with Interplay losing the right to develop an MMO or anything else that uses the license. Presumably the MMO they were making is now dead too.
However Interplay are still permitted to sell the original two Fallout games along with Fallout Tactics until December 31st 2013, additionally Zenimax is to pay Interplay $2 million as part of the settlement, so they won’t quite be walking away empty handed.
Part of me feels sorry for Interplay in this whole affair since it was their IP to begin with and the terms of their license agreement with Bethesda never seemed very fair to me (you can make a Fallout MMO but not use any copyrighted content from the Fallout universe!?). But then again the talent behind the original Fallout’s was largely absent from the MMO, so it’s unlikely that it would have done the name much justice anyway.