He’s dead, Jim.

• August
• 18

2:14 pm Hellgate London

Remember that big news Gapes said that was coming around? Here it is. A full review with CEO Bill Roper of Flagship Studios that answers every question imaginable, courtesy of 1UP.

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Bill Roper speaks out at last
Flagship founder breaks silence to talk about his company’s demise.

The rumors and dirt have been flying ever since Flagship Studios — makers of Hellgate: London and Mythos — announced massive layoffs on July 11, 2008 and subsequently lost the rights to both games. Until now, we’ve heard nothing from the normally high-profile and media-friendly Bill Roper, Flagship’s cofounder and CEO.

In a worldwide exclusive, 1UP.com’s PC games Editor-in-Chief Jeff Green sat down with Roper and got him to break his silence and tell his side of the story regarding the drama swirling around Flagship, Hellgate, and Mythos. What exactly happened here, from his perspective? What went wrong? What would he have done differently? And what’s next for both the games and the developers? Roper has felt that there have been numerous misconceptions floating around for the past month. Here is his take on things.

GFW: You’ve had an interesting last year, to say the least. So, how the hell are you, Bill?

BR: Doing OK, all things considered. Yeah, alive and breathing — better than the alternative. It’s definitely been an interesting six to eight months since the Hellgate launch. Been a lot of things going on since October. Seems like longer than that. I spent a lot of hours in the office, sleeping on the floor, phone calls all across the world, working on stuff….

GFW: So let me ask you one question about the office right now. Is there still a Flagship office that has employees in it?

BR: Sort of? I know it’s a weird answer, but, yeah, we do. We announced [on July 11] that we had to lay off the vast majority of the employees, but there’s still a small handful of the founders working on things. Really, our focus now has been on how we best take care of the guys that aren’t there anymore and help them find jobs with other teams. We handpicked everybody, both on the game-content side and the online-technology side. So we’re really working to get those guys placed. Then, past that, we’ve been spending a lot of time trying to take care of our creditors and other fiscal challenges. But it’s definitely at the point where we’re not exactly trying to plot a gigantic turnaround with a bright, rosy future at Flagship. It’s unfortunately more the other side of the coin.

GFW: So is it really a matter of how to end it gracefully? Is that fair to say?

BR: Yeah. It really is. We’re working hard on how to end gracefully. Obviously, we’ve got people we owe money to, so we’re doing absolutely everything in our power to get those people the money we owe them, whether that’s on an institutional side, lenders, or, equally as important, with our employees who aren’t there anymore.

GFW: OK, so let’s back up and talk a little about exactly what went down here.

BR: Well, we’ve basically spent the last eight months, after we shipped Hellgate and had Mythos in development, looking at what the next phase was for Flagship. For us, the main concern was trying to find the right partnership. We knew that we had to take the step past just project funding into studio funding. We were really open with our guys about that and said that this is what we’re pursuing. So we started that, talking with potential investors, other companies, publishers [and] trying to find the right partnership that would allow us to put the proper focus on making the best games we could.

GFW: So were you talking about actually being bought out?

BR: As a possibility, yeah. Acquisition was a possibility. Investment was a possibility.

GFW: Did you guys talk with EA about possible ownership?

BR: Yeah, we talked with them. We talked with a lot of groups. Some companies were really interested, and we had very long discussions with them. Other companies weren’t really in the position to do so because of other acquisitions they were in the middle of, or even, with some companies, acquisitions they’re still trying to make happen. Even giant companies can only do so many things at once, right? Those wheels, while they tend to be pretty powerful, are also unfortunately kind of slow. So we ended up having two or three different companies really interested in doing investments that would lead, potentially, to acquisitions…

GFW: This is in what time frame?

BR: This is over the last, oh, four or six months. At the high levels, from a business-management standpoint, that was the focus. This is a transition that we wanted to do. We knew that we wanted to do things a lot differently; we didn’t want to spend four and a half years working on a 10s-of-millions-of-dollars title anymore. We really saw Mythos as the direction we wanted to move — digital distribution, smaller projects based off of core technologies. So we were pitching those games, those kinds of game ideas. We were looking for other companies that had that same mindset to work with, and ultimately, we found a couple that we were really interested to talk with, and [we] actually entered into fairly lengthy negotiations with one particular company. Ultimately, that didn’t work out.

I think that, maybe, because we tend to think with our hearts a little more than [with] our heads, we probably chased that deal for too long, because we really wanted it to happen. We always were under a very firm belief that we would get this together. Such a firm belief that– much to the shock of the investment bank we were working with — we as the founders put up our own money into making it happen. And anyone in business will tell you that spending your own cash is a terrible idea. In fact, when we did eventually have to lay almost everybody off, the last paycheck we paid out all came out of the board of directors’ pockets because we had anticipated having a deal done by that time. And because we didn’t know if we were going to get [the deal] done within another pay-period time frame, and we didn’t personally have the money to be able to do that again, it came to the point where we had to [let people go]. It probably goes against popular belief, but just because we all used to work at Blizzard, [it] doesn’t mean that we’re all millionaires, although that sure would have been great.

GFW: So you’re not getting a royalty from every World of WarCraft subscription?

BR: [Laughs] Yeah, unfortunately, no, I don’t get a check from every [copy of] Diablo, WarCraft, or StarCraft that sells. It got to the point where — just to illustrate the lengths that the board went to — I had to basically liquidate 401(k)s to pay people’s salaries. I felt responsible for these guys and gals that worked at Flagship, and when we couldn’t get a deal to drop in enough time, we had to make a really difficult, and unfortunate, business decision. Honestly, [it was] probably too late. We really should have looked at it a month earlier and said, hey, we still don’t have a deal done, [and] the company’s starting to run out of funds — we should do this now. From a personal standpoint. But I don’t really think that any of us thought of it from a personal standpoint, like, “What can I do to protect myself?” I was thinking more like: “We’ve gotta keep the team together. We’ve gotta keep the games moving forward. We feel like we’re really close.” So unfortunately, when that wasn’t going to happen, we did have to make that really hard and painful decision. I’d always maintained that the day we left Blizzard North was the hardest professional day I’d ever had. That was easily trumped when we had to sit there and tell everybody that we had to let them go.

GFW: I don’t know how much time you’ve spent reading message boards, and obviously, people don’t understand the intricacies of the business process here and what you guys have gone through. But how does it make you feel to know that there are people who are saying or might be thinking, “Well, gee, these guys laid off all of their workers, and they’re still raking it in…”

BR: It’s pretty disappointing. I understand that, unfortunately, the Internet seems to be a haven for people who like to just get out there and throw out the most vitriolic and aggressive stance they can. But there’re no secret piles of money that the company’s somehow magically making. I haven’t been paid in almost two months, and I’ve been putting money out to try and get people taken care of. That’s the flip side. When people think, “Oh, wow, these guys are starting their own company. They’re gonna sell it. They’re multibillionaires!” They don’t really see the other side of it, that when that doesn’t happen, you continue to invest your lifeblood into it because that’s why you started it in the first place. When we started Flagship and the first nine of us were there working at Tyler [Thompson]’s house, we had to pay the guys minimum wage so they could legally be employees. None of us were sitting on tons of cash. We were burning through savings to get the company started up. The unfortunate ending on the other side is not that we made a good-but-not-great amount of money, so we let everybody go and kept that good amount of money. I think that we, again, were probably thinking more with our hearts than our heads, and any money that came into the company at all was turned around into chasing Hellgate — trying to make it better, doing the patches. We didn’t get a lot of support financially. We poured pretty much every penny the company had into doing that.

GFW: What would have it taken, do you think, to have been able to do that? Would it have taken money from EA? Is that who you mean?

BR: No, I think that, well, part of the challenge was that when we originally came up with the concept of doing the game, the whole idea of continuing content was pretty amorphous. How that was going to happen, who pays for that — we all kind of assumed that would come out of the revenue. The subscription money we did get, we all poured directly into keeping the game online, keeping it up and running. But the development demands far outstripped the revenues. There just wasn’t a good contemplation early on of how that would work. It wasn’t like: This is the budget that comes in every month; we’ll do whatever we can do with that. We just said [that] development will get done out of the revenues, and whoever pays for development, they get paid back out of the revenues. And there wasn’t really enough revenues coming in to cover the expected and required development costs. I will say that for a good amount of time, we did get some funding from Hanbitsoft. But I throw that out with the caveat that this [is] the “old Hanbitsoft.” There was definitely a change of command there over the last couple of months, once T3 made their investments. Things definitely dramatically changed, not only, unfortunately, in our relationship with them, but just in their attitudes toward our company and what they demanded would happen.

GFW: Why don’t we go over that a little bit — the timeline of when these other companies got involved, and how it went down from your side of things.

BR: Sure. I think the thing that I’ll start with is that we’ve been really happy with how supportive Namco and EA have been through all of this. When it became apparent that Flagship wasn’t going to be able to be a continuing concern, when we were going to have to shut things down, Namco stepped up immediately. Zack Karlsson contacted me from over there and said they wanted to keep the game going and asked how they could work to make that happen. EA’s been incredibly supportive with that as well. They’ve hired some of our guys, as did Namco, so they can continue to keep the operations going, which I was really happy about. Making sure that our players could keep playing the game. The first thing we did was we turned off billing, because we didn’t want anybody to get charged when we knew we weren’t going to be able to give them any more content. So it was pretty difficult, with a lot of things happening amazingly fast. There was a lot of confusion for players early on, like: “Am I going to get billed? I want to cancel my account because I don’t want to get billed, but I can’t get into my account manager because we’ve [Flagship] locked everything up.” So we basically froze everybody at the status they were at, whether they were a subscriber or not, in terms of the content they could access. But we also made sure that people weren’t getting recurring charges. We didn’t allow people to make new subscriptions. They could still make accounts to play the game for free, but they couldn’t subscribe. That was a really big concern of ours; we didn’t want to be misrepresenting what people would be getting. Again, to their credit, the Namco and EA guys were immediately on it to make this work out.

GFW: What would have happened if somebody who got a boxed copy at that time, or even now, and saw the stuff in the shrink-wrapped box about getting a subscription…

BR: People can still go online and play for free, like it says on the box. The only thing they can’t do right now is actually make a subscription account. I know that, right now, Namco is looking at how they want to handle that moving forward. Obviously, we’ve given them the pertinent information for any of the guys that they would need to do whatever it is they want to do. I can’t speak for them, but I think that as much as anybody else, they were surprised that this was all happening, so they’ve really had to do a lot of on-their-feet thinking and moving really quickly to take the next step, so players can still get on and play for free. What they end up doing on the subscription side I’m not really sure. They just need time to figure that out and see what they want to do.

GFW: Back to the involvement of these other companies…

BR: Sure. The other major component of that, on the Asia side, is Hanbitsoft. It’s been really kind of discouraging to read some of the press that’s coming out of Korea. We worked with Hanbitsoft for a long time. Back in the Blizzard days, we launched StarCraft and Diablo with them. Together, both companies had a huge amount of success. When we started Flagship Studios, there really wasn’t any doubt we wanted to work with Hanbit. That was our known, comfortable, go-to company, because I’d known them for a long time and had a very good relationship with them. The real challenges started when T3 came in as an investor, and pretty much everything changed overnight. Obviously, when companies are dealing with each other, there’s a lot of NDAs, especially with publicly traded companies involved. So we didn’t really have any kind of heads-up that that was happening. We literally read about the investment from T3 online.

GFW: So T3 made the deal with whom?

BR: They made their investment in Hanbitsoft, and as part of that investment, they took over a lot of the management there. So when we were in Asia on a business trip and talking with different companies about investments, we took the opportunity to go by Hanbitsoft’s office and meet the new people. It was very evident, immediately, that this was the new management of the company. The first day [we were there], we probably spent about four or five hours talking with them and getting to know them, and they sounded excited about working with us. The thing that really upsets me now is reading where Hanbit’s saying that they made numerous offers to us, and that we rejected these offers — almost kind of implying that we were greedy and lazy or something. The second day we were there, they did present us with an offer…

GFW: And this would be for what? For them to actually buy the games? Buy the IP? Buy you…?

BR: Unlike Hanbit, I’m hesitant to violate my NDA and disclose information, so I can’t get into all the details with you. The new Hanbitsoft hasn’t had much of a problem disclosing confidential information to the press, which was pretty shocking to see. I take a poor view of business partners, former or current, breaking contracts in that way. So I’m always very sensitive to that and don’t want to do that. Basically, they presented an offer on how we could work together. We couldn’t pull the trigger on a deal just like that, though. I had to go back, talk to the rest of the board of directors, our investment bank, [and] the employees — those types of things.

The timeline to do so that was presented was very short. And basically, the offer wasn’t competitive with two other offers we had on the table. We really wanted to work something out, so we came back to Hanbitsoft and were very honest with them and said the deal wasn’t competitive. But as originally intended, the loan we had received from Hanbitsoft, to which Mythos was the collateral, was designed to be a bridge to finding a studio investment. And that was regardless of whether it was with Hanbitsoft or another company. Now, granted, that loan was with the old Hanbit. That was the deal we worked out, and the new guys said we should do this deal with them. And I said that I appreciated the fact that they’ve made an offer, but at the same time, my fiduciary duty to the shareholders is to find the best deal for the company — and also to find the best deal for the team.

I think Hanbit was in a difficult situation from that standpoint, because they were approaching us as a publisher who wanted to cut a deal with us, but they were also a shareholder in the company. I tried to explain to David Kim, who’s the CEO there now, that it almost feels like a conflict of interest. A) I don’t have the power to do this deal; there are other people involved. And B) we can’t just say we’ll do the deal with you because it’s you. I’ve got to try to find the best deal. I’ve got to do right by you as a shareholder in Flagship, just like I have to do all the other shareholders in Flagship. That, I think, made it exceptionally challenging. Unfortunately, when we came back to them and said their offer wasn’t going to be competitive, but that we had some other ideas and laid out a plan of how we could work with them to reach a deal with a different investor that would have benefited them greatly as a shareholder, they were…wholly uninterested. At that point in time, they informed us that their deal was non-negotiable — which they had actually never told us, verbally or in writing. And they pulled their deal off the table and pretty much refused to talk to us about anything else, other than another deal that they put on the table a week later that was untenable. It didn’t even make any sense.

GFW: Was it worse?

BR: Markedly, and it was one sentence.

GFW: Deal or no deal…

BR: Yeah. That may be how they were used to doing business. I’m not sure. But it was nothing that we could do. We went to them a couple of times with different proposals. Each time they basically refused to talk to us about anything involving that. Again, it was really discouraging to see that after the relationship started to fall apart.

GFW: So they were basically saying…we’re going to be your investor, or nobody is?

BR: Well, we’re not going to help you get anybody else to be the investor. They didn’t really have the ability to block somebody else from investing, but they certainly held some keys in regard to us being able to do a couple of deals that, again, would have been incredibly beneficial to them.

GFW: So why would they do that? Again, just in your opinion…

BR: I don’t know. I honest to god wish I knew. I don’t want to believe that their offer was disingenuous, and it was just designed to be something that we wouldn’t be able to accept. The end result, regardless of why it was done, is that because we did make the loan with them, they currently, to a degree, control Mythos, because that was the collateral for the bridge loan.

GFW: OK, so they can now say, and I’m just putting this in laymen’s terms so we can all understand it, is: “You owe us money. You don’t have it. You offered Mythos as collateral, so now we’re taking that collateral.”

BR: Right. That’s the simplified version. They haven’t taken that final step, actually. But that is where it’s at. We don’t have the money to pay back the loan. I think right now, which is pretty evident by some of the things they’ve been doing publicly, they’re trying to figure out what to do with Mythos. They have it free and clear, and they’re looking to start up, apparently, some U.S.-based studio to do something. [Read more about T3’s new studio.]

GFW: Who has the Hellgate IP right now?

BR: Right now, Comerica does. It’s basically held by the bank. If Flagship could come up with the money to pay back the loan, it’s ours again. But we don’t have that money. We’ve been working with Comerica to provide them with anything and everything they’ve requested to be able to properly represent the IP, represent what’s being held in escrow, and working with them to try to identify people that might be interested in that. Even if this means that we can’t work on it anymore, which is pretty painful. You spend four years working on a game and then to not even be able to do anything with it — it’s pretty rough.

GFW: Does that only affect any further stuff that would be done with Hellgate, or does that include the game as it exists now?

BR: Both.

GFW: OK, because right now, isn’t Namco involved…

BR: Well, Namco and EA are continuing to operate the game. But, for example, they can’t do any development on it. They can’t make new content.

GFW: So Comerica’s control is the IP…

BR: IP, code, tech, and tools. So to be honest, if I personally had the money, I’d buy it back out. The technology and the toolset that we built is a really powerful platform for creating titles. That was really the goal of what we were going to be doing at Flagship. We were going to be using the tech and tools — using the platform — [and] creating games based off of that as our core moving forward.

GFW: It has got to be painful to have been the creator of something, even just the tech and the code, let alone the game itself, and have that be owned by somebody else…

BR: Yeah. It really is. It was a decision that we made because we needed to get more money into the company. Comerica’s been very good to work with. They’ve done a lot of movie funding, but funding game development is a new area they wanted to move into. We worked something out with them that worked pretty well for a while, but then, eventually, we weren’t going to be able to meet the rest of the commitments. But we continue to work with them, even through this part of the process, really closely. I think that’s another big difference now. I’ve talked with Comerica pretty much constantly. I haven’t heard from Hanbitsoft in two months. So I’m not really sure what they’re going to be doing. I know most of what I know reading the Internet.

GFW: Sorry.

BR: [Laughs] Well, I know some things. I know that they haven’t had much luck in getting anybody from Flagship. I know none of the principals or the directors have any interest in working with them. I know the Mythos team doesn’t want to work on that. I think they’d love to be able to work on Mythos, but they pretty specifically wouldn’t want to work for T3.

GFW: So this new S.F. studio — they’re not talking with you guys about that?

BR: I know that they did interview former Flagship employees, but as far as I know, of everyone I talked to, nobody accepted a position at this point. Certainly — and definitely — nobody at any kind of high level. And nobody from the Seattle team, which was the core of the Mythos team.

GFW: They own the game as it exists right now, in the state that you guys left it?

BR: Yeah. But I think part of it is — the challenge they face is — it’s like if somebody says, “Hey, I made you a loan against your Ferrari, [and] now the loan’s due, so I want the Ferrari.” And I say, “Great, here’s a box of parts, because I didn’t actually finish building the car yet.” So they have it, but it’s not done, and they don’t have any of the engineers that were there that know how to build the game or use the tools or use the tech or anything. So yes, you have it, but you have it where it is, which isn’t done yet. It’s a lot different from a movie. With a film you can say, “Here’s all the footage. Get some competent guys with an Avid system, and you could piece something together. Go shoot some more scenes. Release the film.” Totally different situation here. There isn’t just a quick way you can slap something together. So I think that they’re facing a big challenge: How to actually get a shippable title out of this without that team being there anymore. Unfortunately, it isn’t something we didn’t kind of warn them about. We said, “We want to know what you guys will do.” We had transition service agreements that we have done everything we can to fulfill. Flagship at this point is unable to actually provide those transition services. I don’t have programmers anymore, or artists to work on the title, but we provided them with all the personal contact information with anyone they wanted. After that the onus is on them as far as whether or not to bring those people in.

GFW: Have you thought about how you would feel if they get some team together and actually somehow cobble it into a game? Are you going to have mixed feelings — like you’re glad that somebody was finally able to put this baby out — or do you wish that it just got killed with you guys?

BR: I think what I would really want to see is that there was some way where Travis [Baldree] and his guys were able to finish their game. It’s pretty different from, for example, how I feel about the Diablo III stuff. I’m excited to see Diablo III, because it’s a whole new thing. They’ve got a whole new direction on it. They have a few of the guys that worked at Blizzard North still around, but there’s a whole new team on it, and it’s like, OK, it’s their license, and they’re trying to really move the bar and do something different with the Diablo license. Yeah, I’m excited when I see what they’re coming up with.
GFW: Have you followed the little minicontroversy about the art direction?

BR: Yeah, it’s not surprising. Only from the standpoint, as we touched on earlier, that the Internet is a place where people like to rail on everything. But it’s the art direction they chose to go with. It’s a whole different group of guys that worked on it when we were there. So it makes sense [that] they’d probably think about giving you some better visibility, make it easier to play, [and] get a broader audience.

GFW: What was your own gut reaction to the art direction?

BR: I just thought it was different. I think the thing I always liked about the Blizzard North and Blizzard HQ constructs is the fact that they were two very distinct groups. At Irvine, we had a way that we approached things — game development, art style, from color to character shapes, everything — that was very distinct from the guys at Blizzard North. I think that it made it pretty compelling when you bought the Diablo titles. You got something that was markedly different from what you got out of a WarCraft or StarCraft. I think now, because everything’s down there, you’re seeing the Irvine take on the Diablo universe. So it’s just the direction they’re going with the people they have and the mindset there. I always liked the fact that Diablo was very dark and Gothic and gritty and edgy, but I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with the direction they’ve gone. They just chose to go a different way.

I think the core Diablo fans are saying, “We really like the dark, edgy, gritty look of that game!” We had people impaled on spikes, for god’s sake. And now it’s kind of bright and airy and doesn’t quite feel the same. But I dunno. I look at it, and it’s got high production quality, and it looks like it’s going to be really fun to play. I think that wall of zombies is the coolest concept for a spell maybe ever. It’s not any different in terms of gameplay mechanics, but it’s so cleverly thought-out. I’m gonna raise a wall of undead! Oh my god, why didn’t we ever think of that! It’s genius! So I look forward to that. Again, it’s a take on something, even if it’s different. With Mythos, it’s a thing where?it’s mostly done, and you want the guys who were working on it, pouring their vision into it, their heart and soul into it, to be the ones who complete it. Short of somebody else being involved with the project, I don’t really see that happening.

GFW: It has got to kill you, I think, because you took a lot of hits in the press and from the public about Hellgate, but Mythos was different. You had made this kind of critical turnaround, at least as far as the beta was going, and then to have the rug pulled out from under you…

BR: It really felt like Flagship was on that verge of turning a corner. Hellgate came out, and it wasn’t as good as it should have been. There’s a myriad of reasons for that. Some of them were just bad timing in the PC market. The PC market was lousy last year. Some of it was the fact that we were an independent studio. We didn’t have unlimited money, and we had to ship when we had to ship. Part of it was because we overreached, and that was a design problem that was totally our fault. We tried to do too much. We tried to be a standalone game and a free-play game and an MMO and an RPG and a shooter. We were trying to be something for everybody and ended up really not pleasing many people at all…

GFW: So if you knew then what you know now, what would you have done differently all along? Maybe both on the development and the business side.BR: Less. It’s actually a pretty easy answer. I would have done less. Now, I think that some people will immediately think: “What else would you guys cut out? There wasn’t enough!” But I don’t mean less in terms of content but in terms of breadth — so that we could have had deeper content. Taking the time that we spent on doing a Vista version and supporting the Games for Windows program and doing a single-player game; there were a lot of things that we did where we could have put that time into better content generation. It would have been a double win, because there would have been fewer things to go wrong, so we could spend more time on things that did go right. I don’t think we should have launched in, whatever it was, the 17 languages that we did. I mean, literally, when you’re sitting there and you have to spend another day and a half because you have to get rid of these bugs in the Slavic-language version, and you’re like, wait, why did we do that? No offense to our Polish gamers, but why did we launch in Polish? Because we’ve got too many bugs in the Polish-language version, so we have to burn cycles on that, burn QA testing on that, [and] burn a build on that. All that adds up.

I think that part of the problem was that when we were looking at how long it was going to take us to even go through the bug phase, we based it off of our past experiences [at Blizzard]. And we were doing so much more at Flagship. Not only so much more from a development standpoint, but we also had to spin up from zero. Not only were we developing a game, we had to do the online-services side. Anybody who went through the first painful week or so of our billing process will attest to the fact that we didn’t get everything tested. We did right by everybody, eventually. Nobody got overcharged or got incorrect credit card billings or had to pay fees or any of that stuff. But still, we didn’t have the time or the bandwidth to test it all. I think it was because we just tried to do too much. On the business side, we should have picked a model. And we tried to hybrid. Now, I like to try to give us a little credit for trying to be innovative and do something different…

GFW: When you say hybrid, you mean…

BR: Free- and subscription-based. I think we should have picked one or the other. We should have said, “Hey, you buy the box, and then it’s free online play, and we’re going to [disappear] for a year, except for bug fixes, and crank out a new expansion.” Or we should have said: “You know what? There’s no single-player version. It’s subscription only. That’s how we’ve geared the game. That’s how it’s gonna work,” and done that from the beginning. We wanted to get people who’d never subscribed to a game before to play it by themselves, then go online and play it with their friends, and then they see all this new content and want to subscribe. But I think that was a model that caused a lot of confusion and caused a lot of division amongst our community, too. I think the thing with Mythos that you saw in a lot of the gameplay elements, the business model, and the way we were working with the community was based on what we learned that we did wrong with Hellgate.

I think that’s the really sad part. It really felt like we were turning the corner. OK, we made mistakes. The Hellgate game came out, and it wasn’t great. But, you know, we also had a lot of players who enjoyed the game. And it’s not like the game didn’t sell at all. But it should have been a lot better. We really take responsibility for not being better. But we can just sit around saying that really sucked, or we can do something about it, and so we were working really hard. It was twofold: First, to make the changes in Hellgate that people wanted, to make it a better game, to continue to make it a better product, and try to grow it over time, and then learning from all that in what we were doing with Mythos. And so the projected future of the company was great. We knew Mythos was going to be great, so we’d build off that and see what we could do with it. So yeah, it is pretty tough when you just can’t economically make that work out.

GFW: At what point did you guys feel like maybe you shouldn’t have done the hybrid model? Was it before or after you launched Hellgate?BR: Before we launched. GFW: So you already knew…

BR: We knew before we launched. There was enough feedback from people where we realized, yeah, we probably made a mistake. But at that point…the train had left the station. We didn’t have enough initial content in there to [switch directions]. We might have been able to back off and go to a free-to-play-only model, but we didn’t have anything in place to roll right into doing an expansion. Everything from the development side to the business side was set to this model that we’d put together. We hoped that it was going to actually work, and we told ourselves that maybe it’ll work better than we think it’s going to work, right? But there was just a lot of confusion.

People were saying there’s going to be the haves and the have-nots. There was a lot of backlash against the model. It’s always tough to gauge percentages, though, because the people who post online are the people who are angry regardless of whatever, so then you’d assume that everybody hates the game, or everybody doesn’t like your magazine, or whatever it is. We definitely had people that were never happy with what we did. But we also had a lot of subscribers that were really happy with the work that we were doing, who felt the game was getting a lot better. We could even see it [on our message boards]. We’d put a post up announcing what we were doing in the next update, and there would be X number of people who would say, “There’s no way we’re going to play this game; it’s a total piece of crap,” but then over time those posts became fewer, and we started to get the supporters saying, “I dunno. I’ve been playing for the last four months. These guys are working their asses off, and they’re doing a lot of good work on it.” And that really was the case.

We never really much left crunch mode, for the core Hellgate guys. Once the game shipped, we said, OK, what can we do? Part of that was getting it ready for the other markets — getting ready to launch in Asian markets, trying to put in content or mechanics that they wanted specifically. A lot of it was us listening to our different advocates in the community. We set up this advocate program where character classes and gameplay were going to be the key. We were spending a lot of time on the boards and really doing everything that we were able to do, from an extremely underfunded standpoint, unfortunately, as far as trying to make the game better. I think we could have done more a lot faster if, again, we had the funding that was designed specifically for that ongoing content. There was some that was coming in, but it didn’t come close to matching what we needed to meet all the requests of not only the fans but our publishers. Obviously, if the revenues were bigger… But it kind of became this negative perfect storm of us trying to chase making the game better and really digging ourselves into a bigger and bigger hole. That’s why we did things like take out loans against our IP and pouring our own money into it, so we could turn the corner. And we ran out of gas before we got around the corner.

GFW: In general, about Flagship and listening to all these stories, it sounds like such a…almost like a small-business nightmare in a way. It makes me wonder a couple of things. One is, and if this is totally off-base just tell me, but I wonder if you guys as a group almost ended up being…the success that you had with Blizzard almost ended up being a negative in terms of maybe making you more naïve or more susceptible to making not the greatest business decisions. Under Blizzard, there was so much support and so much money. But when you went out on your own — which is everybody’s dream, to start their own business — maybe you were not in the greatest position, not having that incredible infrastructure that Blizzard has…

BR: Yeah, I think that’s a part of it. We knew it wasn’t there. Obviously, you know what your budget is, and you know when the money comes in, and you look at what’s getting spent. It could have been a lot better in a lot of ways. Certainly on the day-to-day management, on the money side, on just trying to work toward…I think maybe a big one is just the fact that we knew how to develop based on what we’d done at Blizzard for the past 10 years. That development style can be extremely effective, but it also is dependent on at some point being able to say, hey, we need three more months or six more months to continue to iterate and polish. When we got to that stage, we didn’t have that. There wasn’t that additional, “Great, we’ll give you another X million dollars to get you through the next amount of time.” It was like, yeah, well, how are you guys going to pay for that? And we said, yeah, we can’t, so I guess we’re coming out. And that’s a big challenge.At Blizzard there was always the freedom, where if you could make your case, to whoever it was — Cendant, Davidson and Associates, Vivendi — whoever it was at the time: “This is why we need this much more time, [and] this is the benefit you’re going to get out of it.” And they would say, yeah, that makes a lot of sense — take the next six months or whatever it would take. And that’s great when you’ve got the financial backing that allows you to do that, but when you’re an independent studio, you don’t. Even when you realize, wow, we need more time, if you don’t have the budget for it, and you can’t get the money for it, you just can’t do it. So you’ve got to ship the game.

A lot of it, too, is the fact that we set a date; we all agreed that we’d be able to hit that date; hitting that date was based on our past experience with Blizzard in terms of how long it took us to fix bugs and complexity and things like that. The marketing money got spent to do that. Once marketing starts happening, if you change the date, you’ve flushed that support. We said we’ve got to ship. As we started down that path, working on the bugs and things, there was so much more there, and it was so much more complex than we’d ever imagined, certainly far more than our experience had taught us. I think that’s another area where maybe, indirectly, the Blizzard experience hurt us, where we based our expectations off, well, this is about how long things took there. Then we go there and realized not only do we have all the game stuff to debug, but we have all the online stuff to debug because this is our first title we’re shipping with that, too. And we’ve got all these other things, different platforms to support. We’re supporting XP and Vista. We’re doing all these different languages. It all came together. We just couldn’t get everything…

GFW: Kind of going back to what you said about less…

BR: Yeah, yeah. We would do a lot less. We’d support less areas, and in the areas we’d focus on, we’d do a hell of a lot better job focusing on them. It would have allowed us to put a lot better focus on those areas.

GFW: So what would you say to the players now who are still into Hellgate, or who still want to believe, or are still hoping for more? There’s still a fan base out there. You probably have people who are frustrated or hate you but still love it.

BR: Yeah, I think that’s accurate. There are people who love the game and have been there supporting it since the beginning and have kinda gone through the struggles and the continued work on the title. It was really for those people, first and foremost, that we worked with Namco to keep the game going. We didn’t want Flagship’s closing make the game go away. So we were really happy when we talked it through with Namco and they said, “Yeah, let’s figure out how we can keep this going.” So that’s been really good. I have no idea what will happen in terms of future development. I really don’t know. That’s going to depend on whoever ends up with the Hellgate IP and their level of interest.

GFW: So the state the game is in right now is where it’s locked, until the point at which somebody else may have the IP or not…

BR: And may or may not do something with it. So it really depends. Even if somebody picked up the IP, that’s no guarantee that there would be more development on Hellgate: London. They may pick it up and do other things with it. Or they may pick it up and not really do anything with the IP because they like the technology and the tools. It’s really open. I think that there could be more done with it, but it would be somebody who looks at that and makes a strategic decision. But it wouldn’t be anything that would happen fast. And again, as far as I know — and I hope I’m not misrepresenting because of something I’m not informed of over the past week — nobody yet has a claim to it. That was one of the things I was concerned about in the Gamasutra article, where [T3] said they’re starting a studio to continue Mythos and Hellgate development. That’s a little cart-before-the-horse. They don’t really have any ability to work on Hellgate. They actually don’t have the legal right to work on Hellgate. Maybe that’s something they anticipate getting, but that’s a little presumptuous to throw out there, that that’s what you’re going to be doing.

GFW: They can with Mythos, right?

BR: They could, if they elect to. And they take that final step to enable themselves to. That’s a more accurate representation of the possibilities. Again, not saying either one is impossible, just that nobody is currently in a position to be doing that with Hellgate. I’d love it if somebody could do that and honestly put in the time and effort, but again, I think it’s going to be the same challenges in terms of working on the Mythos property. The guys are gone. They’re either starting up their own new ventures, or they’re hiring on with different companies, or they’re moving on to different industries, or they’re taking their first vacation in four years. It was one thing when everybody was still there, where it was a short time frame after we had to let people go. I think there was a period of maybe a couple [or] three weeks where everyone was still hanging on, waiting to see if something was going to happen. We were still fervidly working on some kind of deal to do something. But I think at this point, it’s impossible to expect people to wait.

GFW: So if we read some press release in however many weeks’ or months’ time that says, “Great news: Mythos is back in development!” this is not going to be the same guys who were working on the game in the first place?

BR: I would be surprised. I mean, it’s not impossible. I think that if there was a way that the original Mythos team could get the IP all to themselves, they would gleefully work on it. But I know that they don’t have any interest in working on it under the current arrangement.

GFW: What about you personally and the guys you are still in touch with from Flagship? In theory, if someone came in with a bottomless pot of gold and said you can do whatever you want with this money…

BR: I’d marry him, first of all. You can do that now in California! Though I would hope it was a woman…

GFW: Sure, Bill, it can be a woman with a bottomless pot of gold…

BR: This is a beautiful story.

GFW: But, seriously, would you take the IP back and say, “Now I’m going to do it. Now I’ve got the resources!” I just mean from an emotional and mental standpoint, more than anything else. Do you feel done, after what you’ve been through, or would you want it back?

BR: I think it would be rough from that emotional standpoint. I think that’s a thing that the general world never sees. They just assume, “These guys make games. They have this business. They did it. It didn’t work out. They move on.” It’s amazingly difficult from an emotional standpoint. You don’t start a company, two companies, and pour five years into doing something and not become emotionally attached. It’s impossible. For me, personally, it’s been incredibly difficult, because this is the first company I’ve ever started, you know, and been a part of. I kind of always lived and died by the games. As anybody could tell you, during the last days of Flagship, I was pretty much a wreck. And it wasn’t because, oh, all our dreams of financial success are flying out the window. It was the fact that here’re guys that I’ve worked with for anywhere from two to five years that we handpicked. Some of them are in their first jobs in the gaming industry.

I was really happy that we did have some successes, that we actually launched the game. And it wasn’t like it was the worst game on the planet. It had problems — we understand that. But it wasn’t a complete disaster. We built the company to do that. We built an online game-services group. The Ping0 tech was amazingly stable. I think contrary to people’s perceptions, or what they wanted to believe, the only time the game came down in the first days was when we took it down on purpose to fix a bug or address a billing issue. It didn’t crash. It was so much more stable online than Diablo II when we launched it. Which I think was a huge mark of achievement for all the guys that did that. So it definitely got to a point where I was just sick to my stomach knowing that at some point, unless we could get some kind of deal worked out, we’d eventually have to lay people off, [that] things were eventually going to go pear-shaped. Once you get over that hurdle, it’s not like it’s suddenly OK, but it’s like breaking up a relationship. Before it happens you’re like, “Oh god, I’m never going to be able to do this.” You’re nauseous. You’re up all night, panicked about what’s going to happen. After it’s done, it’s not like you feel good about it, but at least it’s done.

So I think if your rich, beautiful woman showed up with that pot of gold — can I throw beautiful in there, too? — I would love to be able to try to buy things free and clear. Unhindered by any past encumbrances. I would do a lot of things really differently. I think that maybe part of the silver lining in all this — and there isn’t a lot in a very dark cloud — but personally, I learned a hell of a lot that I think will make me a better developer, a better executive, manager, whatever. It’s a pretty tough learning experience.

GFW: I know you have regrets about how it went down with Hellgate and certainly about the closing of Flagship, but do you also have regrets about going through this experience as a whole?

BR: I don’t regret the experience. I regret the outcome. I regret that we didn’t give gamers what they wanted. I regret that we had to end up as we ended up. Nothing makes me more upset than knowing that some of the employees are still pretty angry about what happened. But to be honest, nothing makes me feel better than when some of the people we worked with send me an e-mail or get me on IM just to ask how it’s going, or to thank us for the opportunity to work in the game industry. And because they’ve got a game they worked on that shipped, and because they worked on solid technology, a lot of people are talking to them now that they’re out there looking for their next opportunity. That part makes me feel a little better. I don’t think I can say that I regret the ride. I’m just not happy with the outcome.

GFW: So you think you’re not done with game development at this point in your career?

BR: God, I hope not.

GFW: It’s not just going to be the band?

BR: No, I’d love it if I could just get away with that — that’d be great. But no. I’ve always loved games. I’ve always been playing games, and I want to keep working in games. I’d hate to think that all the trials and tribulations of the past five years, and all the upside, all the great things that happened, would be the end of this. I want to be able to build off all of this.

GFW: You didn’t come out of this saying, well, f*** this…

BR: Not now. Maybe in the first few days…but that’s like any relationship. You break up with somebody, and you say, “I’m never doing that again.”

GFW: You didn’t want to be around me the first couple of days after GFW closed down.

BR: Yeah. Exactly. But you get some time, you get some space, and you say, “Well, maybe I’ll try something different. Maybe I’ll not do exactly the same thing again.” Unless I somehow magically make a lot of money with my band, I can’t imagine doing anything else besides making games to pay the rent.

GFW: Would that be the dream job, though? Playing in a band?

BR: That was always the dream job. It’s what I went to college for. But, yeah, maybe I should see what Harmonix has got going on and combine my two loves…

GFW: And then hire me!

—

Well, that’s all she wrote, folks. From the mouth of Bill Roper himself you have heard many of the questions that have gone unanswered for the past month-and-a-half. Here’s a TL;DR version:

THE FACTS

• Flagship Studios IS CLOSING DOWN (with emphasis for the delusional).

• For the past eight months, since Hellgate launched, Flagship Studios has been looking for funding opportunities, as they knew they were already in financial trouble.

• Bill Roper acknowledges that the company had no immediate direction on what to do with anything–business model, development, holding back the launch–and also acknowledges that they were not thinking with their heads but more with their “hearts”.

• Namco/EA is operating the game–this means that they are holding up the servers and the forums. This DOES NOT mean that they are making development changes to Hellgate.

• T3/HanbitSoft OWNS the IP rights to Mythos. This means they can do what ever they wish with the game.

• Comerica (the bank Flagship Studios put Hellgate’s IP up as collateral on their loan) still owns the IP rights to Hellgate and NO ONE has expressed an interest in acquiring them–yet. Even then it is not a guaruntee that if someone does that they will continue the development of Hellgate.

• Alert! Bill Roper still wants to be part of the video game market.

THE COMMENTARY

• Dear Bill: You saw less and less negative feedback on the forums as patches went on because a) your forum moderators banned the critics or b) the critics went on to occupy themselves with something more worth-while.

• 2007 was a good year for PC games; Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, Crysis, Orange Box, Enemy Territory Quake Wars, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, World in Conflict, Unreal Tournament 3, and Bioshock were all 2007 PC games that sold well and are still doing well. Hellgate, however, was hailed as one of the worst launches of all-time.
• Looks like 2.0 was “held back” as an incentive for someone to buy the IP rights to Hellgate. Too bad no one is jumping at the opportunity.
• Hellgate was never going to make a come-back–not with its developers not having the money to support it when they were trying to go down the avenue of Mythos.
• The amount of ego that went into this game rivals Ion Storm’s Daikatana and 3000AD’s Battlecruiser 3000AD.
• We told you so. :P

—
You got Flagshipped!