Publisher Activision has re-gained the rights to Telltale's King's Quest franchise, according to a recent statement by Telltale's Senior VP of Publishing, Steve Allison (thanks Digital Trends). Previously Telltale had announced that it would be developing a series of games based on Sierra On-Line’s classic King’s Quest series of adventure games, however that has now apparently been abandoned in favour of developing games based on Bill Willingham’s Fables comic book series.

“While we deeply love King’s Quest here at Telltale, we can confirm that we are no longer working on the franchise. There was a time last year that we investigated partnering with third party developers to produce the game as a partnership but decided against outsourcing. We are not privy to what plans Activision has for the franchise, if any.”

Confirmation of the return to Activision initially came from president of Replay Games Paul Trowe, who had seen a successful Kickstarter project back in 2012 for a new Leisure Suit Larry title. Talking to Digital Trends, Trowe confirmed that while he had approached Activision on licensing out the King's Quest IP for development after Leisure Suit Larry was finished, Activision actually stated that "No, we’re pulling it because we’re going to do it ourselves."

Currently Activision has yet to reveal just what exactly they will be doing with the newly re-acquired IP, but hopefully we will hear some more news in the coming days. What is definitely known is that neither Telltale nor Replay Games will be heading development.