Legend Entertainment Company was an American developer and publisher of computer games, best known for creating adventure titles throughout the 1990s. The company was founded by Bob Bates and Mike Verdu, both veterans of the interactive fiction studio Infocom that shut down in 1989. Legend's first two games, Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls and Timequest, had strong sales that sustained the company. Legend also profited from negotiating licenses to popular book series, allowing it to create notable game adaptations such as Companions of Xanth (based on Demons Don't Dream by Piers Anthony) and Gateway (based on the eponymous novel by Frederik Pohl). Legend also earned a reputation for comedic adventures, with numerous awards for Eric the Unready in 1993. As the technology of the game industry changed, Legend continued to expand its game engine to take advantage of higher graphical fidelity, mouse support, and the increased media storage of the compact disc.

These industry changes led to difficult competition by the mid-1990s, especially in the adventure game genre. Legend secured an investment from book publishing company Random House and developed additional book adaptations, such as Death Gate and Shannara, as well as original titles such as Mission Critical. However, the company's expenses for graphics were rising without a similar increase in sales, causing Random House to exit the game industry. Legend found game publishers to take over marketing and distribution so it could focus its efforts exclusively on development. While the studio's adventure titles suffered in the changing marketplace, working with game publishers allowed Legend to experiment with more action-oriented titles such as Star Control 3. In its final years, Legend fully pivoted to first-person shooters thanks to a growing relationship with Unreal developer Tim Sweeney and an acquisition by publisher GT Interactive. The studio released the 1999 game adaptation of The Wheel of Time book series, designed using the Unreal Engine as a first-person action game. However, Legend's sales continued to dwindle, followed by the difficult development and commercial failure of Unreal II: The Awakening in 2003. The studio was shut down in January 2004, with staff moving to other game companies.

The business strategy at Legend was clear. ... We were going to make high-quality text adventures for the niche audience that had been abandoned by Infocom. We'd increase the accessibility of the games with great art and a menu-input system in the hope of drawing in a larger audience over time.

Legend Entertainment was founded in 1989 by Bob Bates and Mike Verdu. The duo met in the 1980s working at Infocom, a critically acclaimed developer of adventure games and interactive fiction. After the commercial success of the Zork series, Activision acquired Infocom in 1986. They closed the studio three years later due to rising costs, falling profits, and technical issues with MS-DOS. Bates decided to seek investment for a new game company, hoping to succeed where Infocom had declined. He told investors that the adventure genre was still viable, but it needed to evolve beyond just text. After securing funding from defense contractor American Systems Corporation, Legend Entertainment opened by the end of the year, choosing the name "Legend" for its connotations in storytelling. Through its lifetime, the studio operated out of Chantilly, Virginia, the home of American Systems Corporation.

Initially, the studio recruited former colleagues from Infocom for their experience, including programmer Mark Poesch, and Steve Meretzky as an author and developer. Founder Bob Bates worked with Meretzky on the company's first games. Although they had experience developing an adventure game engine at Infocom, Legend hired an outside team to develop their new text parser in order to avoid infringing the copyright of their old Infocom engine. Legend's debut title was Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls, which expanded on Infocom's text-based adventures by adding graphics for each of the game's rooms. Meretzky described this as a "fusion of the depth and detail of Infocom games with a graphical presentation that would be more in keeping with what audiences circa 1990 demanded", which led to greater sales than their former studio had. Although Legend was worried that the game's raunchy humor might upset their investors in the defense industry, they were relieved that their investors were supportive. At the same time, Bates was developing Timequest with the goal of proving there was still a market for adventure games with intricate puzzles. Legend released Timequest the following year. These first two games earned attention for continuing the legacy of Infocom and signaled a potential rebirth for the adventure game genre.

Legend also benefitted from a strong relationship with traditional book publishers, securing licensing deals for its team's favorite authors while costs were still low. One of the first major licenses was Frederik Pohl's science fiction novel Gateway, adapted into a game of the same name using Legend's now-established adventure game engine. While all of Legend's games featured graphics, it was possible to turn off graphics for their first few games, and play them as if they were classic text adventures. By the end of 1992, Legend were able to buy back American Systems Corporation's stake in the company, and it was selling enough games to easily sustain itself.

In 1993, Legend released Gateway II as their last graphic adventure that could still be played in a text-only mode. The studio continued to expand their game engine, adapting to the popularity of the mouse and the increased media storage of the compact disc. The first project to take advantage of CD-ROM technology was Companions of Xanth, which signaled Legend's shift from traditional text adventures to a point-and-click interface. Programmer Michael Lindner had gained valuable design experience from working on Gateway, allowing him to create Companions of Xarth as a solo project. Based on the novel Demons Don't Dream by Piers Anthony, the game was the first of several games built on the same graphic adventure engine. Companions of Xarth was released in 1993, followed by the release of Eric the Unready. The latter game received several awards and nominations, particularly Computer Gaming World's Adventure Game of the Year in 1993 (as a tie with Star Control II). With the release of Companions of Xanth and Eric the Unready, Legend earned a reputation for comedic adventures. However, Legend's business also began to shift with rising production costs for game graphics.

Around this time, Mark Poesch joined full-time as the director of research and development. In 1994, Legend enabled Glen Dahlgren to release his first solo project as Death Gate, an adaptation of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's fantasy book series The Death Gate Cycle. That same year, Legend released Superhero League of Hoboken, where writer Steve Meretzky updated his brand of comedy. The game was nominated for Computer Gaming World's 1994 "Role-Playing Game of the Year" award, praising Meretzky's comedic dialog and imagination. However, the game sold fewer than 25,000 copies and became Meretzky's last title with Legend.