The company was founded as "Interplay Productions" in Southern California in 1983 with Brian Fargo as president. Its original staff came from former employees of a small video game developer called Boone Corporation. Interplay made a name for itself as a quality computer game developer with the role-playing games The Bard's Tale and Wasteland, which were published by Electronic Arts.

Interplay started publishing its own games, starting with Neuromancer and Battle Chess, in 1988, and then moved on to publish and distribute games from other companies, while continuing internal game development. In 1993, Interplay published the hit game Descent, developed by startup Parallax Software.

The company published several notable Star Trek games, including Star Trek: 25th Anniversary and Star Trek: Judgment Rites. These games had later CD-ROM editions released with the original Star Trek cast providing voices. Interplay also published the significant Starfleet Academy and Klingon Academy games, and Starfleet Command series, beginning with Star Trek: Starfleet Command. Another game, Star Trek: Secret Of Vulcan Fury, was in development in the late 1990s, with a script written by Star Trek writer Dorothy Fontana; however this title was never completed.

In 1997, Interplay developed and released Fallout, a successful and critically-acclaimed role-playing game set in a retro-futuristic post-apocalyptic setting which was followed by a sequel, Fallout 2. The most successful subsequent Interplay franchise was probably Baldur's Gate, a Dungeons & Dragons game that was developed by Black Isle Studios an in house developer many of its core team would go onto found studio such as BioWare and Obsidian entertainment, and spawned a successful sequel and several expansion packs. Over the years, Interplay's most successful titles were PC games. The company published a few notable console games, such as ClayFighter, Rock 'N Roll Racing, The Lost Vikings, and Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, but Interplay was never quite able to establish a long-lasting console franchise.

Another popular franchise was the FreeSpace series.

Interplay attempted to get several of its games made into movies through its Interplay Films branch, notably Descent, Redneck Rampage[1], and Fallout, but no Interplay property was ever made into a film.

As part of one of their 2007 quarterly reports Interplay announced that their revenues had risen astronomically due almost entirely to the sale of their Fallout intellectual property to Bethesda Softworks back in mid-April. With the sale and other changes the company is now almost debt free, with its debt at a reported $3 million today compared to the $59 million from 2001.

In 2004, the company was given an eviction notice by its landlord for non-payment of rent, and was briefly shut down by the California government for non-payment of workers' paychecks. This, combined with sketchy and sporadic information from Interplay representatives, led many in the game industry to speculate that Interplay had shut down. In fact, the company relocated to a small office and continued to operate, issuing occasional press releases about new publishing deals or the sale of an IP to another publisher. The company's web site shut down around this time.

In Summer 2005, the Interplay website re-launched with a logo and three links: "About Interplay", "SEC Filings/Financial", "Investor Relations".
Source: Wikipedia