April Fools day always seems to take the breath out of the news of the week it lands on, and this year is no different. However, if you scrape the bottom of the barrel hard enough, you’re bound to find something.

That’s what I’m here for! This week: The first developer to make a graphical MMO goes under, Blizzard knows how to do April Fools, and the folks over at Realtime Worlds snag a cool $50 million in funding.

I bet you never heard of Stormfront Studios before this week. If you have, you probably didn’t know that they created a little game called Neverwinter Nights for AOL that released around 1991. What makes this newsworthy is that Neverwinter Nights was the first graphical online RPG ever produced. It wasn’t exactly the most successful game in the genre, but its impact is still felt.

Well, it was announced on Tuesday that Stormfront Studios will be no more. After 20 years of game making, with titles ranging from Neverwinter Nights to Eragon, their doors will be closing. Even though gamers owe them quite a bit of gratitude, I’m really not surprised to see them shut down. There are some talented people working there, so hopefully they’ll be able to find jobs elsewhere in the industry. I heard Atari was hiring.

April Fools is over, and people are still talking about the number of pranks that happened around the internet. From Youtube Rick-Rolling all of their visitors, to the awesome Legend of Zelda movie trailer. For the geeks out there, however, no one does April Fools quite like Blizzard.

After years of calling for World of Warcraft on consoles, Blizzard released a page on Tuesday revealing “The Molten Core” for the Atari 2600. Not only is the trailer hilarious, but the differences between the concept art and screenshots had me in tears. Their second prank was the revealing of the new Hero class for Wrath of the Lich King, the Bard. Poking a bit of fun at the Activision/Vivendi merger, the screenshots highlight the bard attacking using a Guitar Hero-like interface.

Yeah, I know it’s not real news, but remember what I said about scraping the bottom of the barrel?

Finally, we’ll take a look at Realtime Worlds, the folks who brought us Crackdown and the upcoming APB or All Points Bulletin. It looks like they’ve recently raised $50 million in funding for their current project under the advisement of Montgomery & Co. We should all hope that this money helps them to further realize their vision for APB. I know I’m personally excited for the game, but it also seems to be trying to do a bit too much, especially for a 2008 release. The best Realtime can do for this game is to push it back to Spring ‘09, and use this new money to add a couple layers of polish. Otherwise they may be coming late to the party without the kind of firepower Stargate Worlds is bringing.

Well, I hear the fat lady singing, so I guess it’s time to wrap this up. Allow me to say that I’m happy April Fools is over. Hopefully next week, some real news will hit the internet. Eh, probably not. Maybe I’m just biased against April Fools Day. Until next week, everyone!

Sources: Massively for Stormfront; TechCrunch for Realtime Worlds

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