[Scarlett.]

US, October 21, 2009 - It would appear that the fight over the Fallout franchise is going to get much, much larger than expected. According to a recent forum post on Raging Bull, a financial tracking site, a user called frymuchan claims that Interplay was granted a ten day extension to respond to the injunction request made by Bethesda.

Supposedly summarizing pieces of the court documents, frymuchan stated that "Interplay argued that they purposefully retained the rights to the original Fallout games when selling the Fallout license to Bethesda knowing full well (as did Bethesda) that Interplay was going to exploit the original Fallout games upon release of Fallout 3." The claim around this was that the original games were only valuable in relation to sales from Fallout 3, and as part of the original deal, it was not subject to unfair competition claims by Bethesda.

Additionally, Interplay argued that Bethesda only had the right to inspect material to make sure it didn't cause potential confusion with Fallout 3, but that it couldn't place unreasonable demands or holds on this approval. Interplay further argues that it didn't spend money marketing the original Fallout properties and has also filed a countersuit against Bethesda based on the supposed illegality of selling the original Fallout games on downloadable services like Gametap, Good Old Games and more.

As for the Fallout MMO, frymuchan says Interplay states it "fulfilled all rights of the agreement and told Bethesda such in a letter that posted prior to the agreement date in April of 2009." However, interplays states that Bethesda simply told Interplay one day that they were not allowed to develop the MMO or sublicense out the franchise. With the extension of the court filing expiring next week, more details are sure to follow.

IGN