Go ahead. Guess. Yep. For some reason someone at Cryptic Studios thought hiring Bill Roper was a good idea. Uh, no. Why, you may ask?

*looks around*

What site are you on again?

Anyways, my heart goes out to the people that are/were looking forward to Star Trek Online. Maybe Roper won’t get it flagshipped. I mean, he’s only the Design Director. Who knows, maybe it’ll actually turn out alright. Or maybe even better because of him!

HAHAHA, oh, sorry, couldn’t keep a straight face there. Swim away from your past failures Roper—-maybe in time no one will remember that 100 people lost their jobs, a foreign publisher went belly up for supporting your product, and thousands of gamers were left in the dark with $50 coasters in their hands. You are a beacon of hope for this industry indeed! For the rest of us sane people: Run fer’ dem’ hills!

EDIT: Rather than make a second story, I figure I’d include a second unrelated gem having to do with the rumor floating around that HanbitSoft would supposedly be doing good things soon. Tiggs, usually the beacon of uncertainty on the forums, had this to say when locking the thread where the supposed E-Mail came from:

Ok it seems the best way to stop these threads is to reply and lock. Hellgate London will shut down forever on January 31, 2009 for the NA and EU servers. There will not be any access ever for NA and EU players on anyones servers.

I’m sorry folks, you’re holding on to dreams that will not come true. -Tiggs

In other news, apparently HanbitSoft E-Mailed people who inquired to what was going on with Hellgate. A user on the forum, Ndarkstar, posted this apparent E-Mail:

To the fans of Hellgate: London,

We wish to express our gratitude to all the fans for showing your passion and dedication to Hellgate: London.

Since acquiring the intellectual property rights, HanbitSoft Inc., the publisher and distributor of Hellgate: London in Asia, has concentrated on the development of Hellgate: London, and has received many inquiries regarding new updates. Our US development studio is currently working on an update that is to surpass “The Abyss Chronicles.” This game will be available through our Web site. We thank you once again for showing your interest and ask for your continuous support for Hellgate: London, as we hope to bring good news shortly. In the meantime, we will continue developing the world’s best game!

Sincerely,

Hellgate: London Product Manager - also a fellow user that loves to play Hellgate: London

Surpass the Abyss Chronicles? Available on their website? Don’t worry, everyone is confused about this. In the mean time, let us celebrate the bastard child that couldn’t’s birthday!

Picture courtesy of KnuckleHead from the Hellgate forums

Link

Heya Folks,

Today, we’re going to be instituting an age gate on the Hellgate: London website and forums. This is in order to bring us into ESRB compliance for a game that is rated M for Mature. If you’d like more information on the ESRB ratings system, you can find it at http://www.esrb.org/

-Tiggs

“HanbitSoft now owns both Hellgate: London, online action RPG and Mythos, casual MMORPG, once used to be developed by Flagship Studios. HanbitSoft now acquires IP (Intellectual Property) including the engines and source codes of both well made titles.

This means that HanbitSoft is now the owner of all the titles that Flagship Studios had been working on, and both titles will be developed in newly established studio in the U.S. HanbitSoft expects that full possession of these titles will not only bring them larger portion of the earnings but also upgrade the quality of contents fit for online games.

HanbitSoft had constantly tried to gain the IP of two titles after Flagship Studios shutdown. The company announced recently that the regarding issues are now all settled, and only thing left is to focus on developing the titles the best way possible.

‘Hellgate: London is now HanbitSoft’s game, and we have already formed a team. They are doing hard work for updates and patches. Service in Asia including Korea is in good hands’ said Gi-Young Kim, CEO of HanbitSoft, and added ‘I believe Mythos is a very attractive MMORPG, just gaining large fans from couple of beta tests. It has a lot of potential and it will also be developed at studio in San Francisco with Hellgate: London. Both titles will be presented soon with upgraded features.’ “

If this is to be believed, then even more interesting is to read a previous post from the same blog, expressing that “T3 Entertainment recruited some of the best developers from Flagship Studios [and] Blizzard [to form] a team” of developers with their own. Of course, one must ask who the “best developers” are from Flagship Studios because I wasn’t aware they had any.

Of course, as we all know by now, the current hub-bub is about a recent newsletter that appeared on HanbitSoft’s Hellgate site. The letter has a part in English that mentions nothing besides a Halloween greeting and the classic “more information is forthcoming” (where have we heard that one before?). The kicker here is that there are the letters “USA” next to a Taiwanese MMO company known as Redbana, followed by a slash of HanbitSoft. Obviously, this looks like the American studio we talked about that was in the works back on July 31. So, to recap: Redbana opened up an American office in San Fransisco to continue to the development of Hellgate: London in the US region (possibly EU, though that’s unknown), which HanbitSoft currently owns the IP rights to.

For those of you still confused, this is a common occurrence for foreign companies. For instance, Granado Espada is a Korean MMO developed by IMC Games, a Korean developer, yet the English version, Sword of the New World, is handled by K2 Network. Of course, from anyone that plays Sword of the New World can tell you, they get the updates from the developers theirselves, which means backups on translations and even adding or subtracting some content for the American counterpart. What this most likely means is that HanbitSoft will firstly continue the development of the game and then send the updates to Redbana USA to translate them for the US servers, hence why the current servers will be coming down on February 1st, 2009, since they will be working with new builds and new servers (which also means that you will unlikely be transfering your old accounts and characters along for the ride).

Of course, that’s just the speculation. Any number of things could happen. But for Hellgate: London, only bad has seemed to follow it. Perhaps that can change. Perhaps.

Santa Clara, Calif., (October 24, 2008) - NAMCO BANDAI Games America Inc., today announced that they will continue to support customers of PC game Hellgate™: London with online server support and play through January 31, 2009 despite the closure of Flagship Studios. In a further gesture of support, Namco Bandai Games will provide this server support free of charge to all fans and players of the game up until the shut down date.

NAMCO BANDAI Games appreciate the enthusiasm of all the Hellgate: London players and looks forward to providing them with future entertainment products.

For questions regarding the shut down or additional information about Hellgate: London, please visit the game’s official website at www.hellgatelondon.com.

Sub features are free through January 31, 2009, after which the servers will shut down. Permanently. Heh. We were wrong, right? Who’s saying that now? Blind men? Anyways, nice run folks. Thanks everyone for being part of gaming history for the biggest failure in the industry.

“Suspension of Hellgate: London’s Multiplayer Service

15/10/2008

Dear Gamers,

The online PC game Hellgate: London, IAHGames will suspend online multiplayer service for the game’s Alliance Server as of 1200hrs (GMT+8) on 21st October 2008. The suspension of service will allow IAHGames, Flagship Studios, and other involved parties to reassess the situation before moving forward.

Be assured that IAHGames has weighed several options and opinions into this situation, and at the encouragement of virtually all involved, from the management to many current players, we feel it is the correct course of action.

All character, account, and item data will be safely retained on our servers until such a time when the multiplayer service status has changed. As such, all the heart and soul you have poured into your characters and Hellgate: London’s online world will not be erased.

Online support of Hellgate: London’s single player mode will continue. The latest v1.2 patch from Flagship Studios can be manually applied here.

The official Hellgate: London Alliance Forum will also be closed. Future updates to multiplayer and single player service will be released via our official site and direct emails.

Thank you for your support and patience.

IAHGames Team”

Seems like SEA players got their 30 day notice. Okay, so it’s actually six days, but who’s counting?

Great decision-making there Turbine! Hire two people that were part of one of the greatest failures in video game history and then hire a nobody to head it all off. Be wary of Turbine; they threw a few life preservers to people in the failed part of the industry to head off a new studio.

We recieved yet another anonymous source giving us some details everyones favorite community manager.   Scapes

According to our source…being the CM for Hellgate London Scapes was given specific duties to tend to.  One of those being a contest that fansites were to be a part of over Christmas.  Scapes was to send out 5 copies of Hellgate London to each Hellgate fansite.  This never occured…Scapes was also to set up and send out posters for said contest which he did, albeit several months late.

Remember the sweet emote video he had that had all the fan boys cooing?  That fine piece of video editing took 2 weeks longer then was planned to be finished, according to the source.

The source also goes on to tell us that prior to Flagship Studios capsizing. “Scapes was actually supposed to have sent out materials and assets to RPGVault (IGN) for a feature that they were doing for Hellgate. He was 3+ weeks late on doing what could’ve been completed in a single afternoon. The assets were never sent out.”

They also go on to say “In the days after Flagship had laid everybody off, they had a final meeting to discuss possible future plans for employees of the company. A lot of the bosses are good guys, though not all of them, but regardless of that, various things were discussed and the subject of the creation of casual games (e.g. like Mythos) was brought up, and Scapes simply walked out of the room mid meeting. Everyone was pretty alarmed by that. When he was confronted, he simply said “I don’t like casual games”, or something to that measure.”

We were also given some info on what Scapes actually earned at Flagship Studios…we were asked not to reveal the number but I can assure you…..its no wonder those guy were in a heap of financial trouble.

There ya have it…a little look at some of the Flagshipping Scapes himself was able to dish out.

I have another bit of info not related to Scapes that we got from a source….hopefully I’ll have time in the next few days to write it up for you guys.

Many thanks to Necx, Project_Xii, lonethar, and Travis Baldree himself for being part of the interview.

—

This was a chat-turned-interview that occured today between travis, Necx and some others. Kudos for Necx on asking such good questions.
Hellgate and Mythos may be dead, but it’s always interesting to hear about the going’s on during their short lives, and also find out some tidbits regarding Runic Games future plans.

Travis Baldree Casual Interview

Necx: Out of curiosity, Travis, have you ever played Hellgate? Did you ever compare Mythos to Hellgate?

Travis: I’ve played some - but I haven’t had time to finish or get beyond Act 2 or 3.

I think a bigger boat is a lot harder to steer. With Mythos we didn’t have to do anything very innovative at all - we went out and replicated a gameplay style that already existed. Let’s be honest - Mythos is just D2 style of play with more MMO bits, and a lot less story and, let’s be honest, style.

Hellgate attempted much more than that - a 3D, first or 3rd person shooter/action-RPG hybrid, with a new setting combining new weapon mechanics that aren’t the staples of the Action-RPG genre. They shot a lot higher than we did, and I sure respect that. With Mythos, we played the safer, simpler bet.

For the record, NOBODY ever thinks their game has no issues. Nobody. There is ALWAYS a feeling on release that you didn’t get in the things you wanted to, or feature A isn’t all it could be, or this part is too short, or you don’t like this UI mechanic. Unless you have enormous resources, game development is a series of hard choices on what to shortchange and still come out with something good and worthwhile at the end. None of those choices are easy, and they can often turn out wrong. The key is usually in making the choices soon enough that you can react and fix it if you made the wrong ones.

I’ve got a laundry list a mile long of things that bugged me to death about Mythos, and that I would have changed. I was always unhappy with the lack of story. I thought our UI was much clunkier than it should have been. I wasn’t happy with our randomized dungeons and thought they all felt much too same-y. I thought at least 80% of our monsters didn’t have interesting enough behaviors. I thought all of the skills could have been better. I thought our bosses weren’t anywhere close to the kind of setpiece bosses I would have liked to have seen. There’s hundreds more entries on that list.

Everybody has a list like that at release. You just try to make sure that the things that ARE in the game still constitute at least a percentage of what you WANTED to achieve (which is usually unachievable given the time you have), and that it’s enough for people to like it. It’s been ages since I played Mythos straight through - it’s hard to afford the time to do it in perpetual crunch. Instead you rely a lot on your testers and QA to give you feedback, and you trust them enough to react to it. I played CHUNKS of the game at all times - hopefully just enough to get a feel for how things are going. Usually chunks scattered throughout - but beyond a certain point, that’s all you can do if you want to get any work done.

Necx: Fair enough. So, from the little that you played, if you had “Endless Pots of Gold”, would you buy HGL under your Runic banner? Would you also try to acquire Mythos back?

Travis: If I had a pot of gold? Hmmm.

I probably wouldn’t buy either IP at this point - Mythos didn’t have the benefit of real preproduction, so it’s a middling IP at best. There’s not enough story there or world to be worth the cash, in my opinion. The strength we had with Mythos was a good community, and a reasonably enjoyable core game that because it had large instances was different than anything else. So don’t take that the wrong way - I love Mythos and I loved working on it, but I’m excited at the prospect of doing a new IP that we can take some more time developing.

Hellgate isn’t my IP - I’ve always thought it was an incredible concept, but it isn’t mine, and I’d feel very odd working on it. I’d LOVE to see a gothic Hellgate prequel set in medieval Germany, played isometrically with a lot of the same demons, and big nasty swords, polearms, and spiked shields, and huge gothic churches, and corrupted priests, and other cool stuff. I think that would rule. But it’s not my IP, and again, I’d just feel uncomfortable.

The network technology for the games was great. If I could get enough of the original engineers back to run it, I’d totally buy it. It would be a huge leg up in getting a new game out. But I’d want to build a new IP - one that our whole team got to participate in, that had some real story, and some unique elements that made it much more interesting.

Necx: That’s interesting really. I surely thought you’d snap up Mythos in a heartbeat.

Travis: We all sort of had to come to terms with losing it - we went to a lot of effort to excite ourselves about starting over, so it’s sort of hard to imagine changing direction now. The opportunity to correct a lot of mistakes we made is pretty attractive.

Necx: Did you enjoy your game (Mythos)? If you didn’t make it would you see yourself playing it?

Travis: I did like Mythos. It’s the kind of game I like to play. I would have liked it to be a lot better, but I enjoyed it. I could have wished that it looked as awesome as Diablo 3, but there you go.

Necx: Did your whole team provide input for Mythos, or did [you] have outside source telling you what it had to be?

Travis: We were allowed to make what we wanted to make - but the whole team wasn’t involved in the start of it because of how slowly we grew - they just weren’t there yet. So everybody got to have input, but after you’ve gone a certain distance down the track, you can’t fundamentally change everything. (Runic Games) is an opportunity for the whole team to be involved right at the start, which is substantially different.

…

Flagship and Bill were very good to me. We got to make Mythos, and I’m extremely thankful for that. Bill wrote our first manual and did voices for us, just because he wanted to help out (this was quite some time ago, and no, didn’t impact Hellgate’s schedule in any way). Hellgate was not the success that we all hoped it would be, but that doesn’t color my view of them as people at all. I love those guys.

Necx: I don’t know man… I’d feel pretty tainted towards him.

Travis: I don’t feel that way though - and I hope that, given that I was out of a job, and lost all of my work, and got to see most everything go down at the end, that says something about Bill. After all of that, I don’t think any less of Bill, because I saw the lengths he went to to save it.

I can understand that founders who’ve payed 150 bucks and didn’t get the game they wanted can be irritated and angry. I know a lot of you also have articulated other causes, but I think most of them stem from that. But losing your job and work is another kind of loss entirely. And if given that, I’m not bitter at Bill, I hope that’s somewhat telling. Don’t take this the wrong way. I’m not telling you you shouldn’t be irritated, or that you have no right to be so. I’m basically just telling you what MY feeling on the final outcome is, which is probably surprising to some of you.

Necx: “…because I saw the lengths he went to to save it.” Can you go more into that?

Travis: Bill was sleeping on the floor for 3 AM calls, and liquidating his retirement at 50 cents on the dollar. When you withdraw from a 401k prematurely, you take an enormous financial hit on its value - and of course, he doesn’t have any of it now. He blew away his retirement because it was the only thing he could do to get the cash to pay. People seem to have this misperception that Bill is a millionaire. Because Bill arrived at Blizzard North as a transplant from South, Bill didn’t end up with a pile of Diablo money.

The directors were in a long and sleepless process for months trying to secure our future - a future that didn’t even necessarily include them. They didn’t have guaranteed jobs out of it - even if the deals had gone through. The deals that they tried to close were to keep the doors open and keep people employed, not to give the directors golden parachutes. They’re out looking for jobs right now like everybody else.

Necx: Travis, I have to seriously question that man. Is he looking for a job? I know a lot of the team are looking and I hope they found jobs. Why haven’t you hired him yet?

Travis: Bill’s still in the process of shutting down Flagship, and trying to keep an eye out for a job at the same time.
There are lots of people that I like and respect from Flagship, but it doesn’t mean that at this stage I can afford to hire them though. It would be awfully weird for me to ‘hire’ Bill anyway, don’t you think?

If you’re at the point of liquidating your retirement at a loss to get cash, that means you really, really don’t have any lying around, or any other way to get it.

Project_Xii: Hmmm. It’s all rather sad. Just hard to find the sympathy to spare you know… specially after reading Roper’s interview and seeing him admit that they knew the hybrid was going to fail. Yes, it’s a rough course of events, but self-inflicted?

Travis: I believe Jeff’s question was - ‘at what point did you guys feel maybe you shouldn’t have done the hybrid model?’ To which Bill responded ‘before we launched’. That’s a little bit different than saying that we ‘knew it was going to fail’. Obviously people’s reaction to the hybrid model of a free and then a premium subscription was not a positive one. He said we didn’t have enough content to switch directions - to change over to an expansion pack model.

Here’s the brass tacks - to support the expense of the servers for the ‘free’ game, some kind of income is required. They’re crazy expensive. The entire business model and game was built around that constant income from subscribers. If you get to within a month of launch, and people are very unhappy about your subscription model, then yeah, you think ‘maybe we shouldn’t have taken this route!’.

But it’s impossible to tell at that point HOW MANY people are really unhappy with it from online reaction. And will they be unhappy with it when they actually see it in action? You don’t know. And you can only guess at the percentages. So since you’re pretty much out of money, and the engineering is done, and the game is going out the door - well, what do you do?
Pray. And it didn’t work out. If it had been all free to play, I don’t believe the financials would have worked out - there wouldn’t have been any money to pay for the servers at all, and it would all have been in the drink a lot sooner.

Necx: Well, he’s the one that gave you a chance. You have great respect for him. If I had someone I admired, I’d pick them up when they are down. But I understand for the sake of (namesake) you wouldn’t want him with runic. You would have a serious amount of people pointing the finger at you.

Travis: Let me be clear - I like Bill, and I would work with him in the future. Just because he’s not working with us now doesn’t mean that I don’t have a great deal of respect for him. And because I like and respect Bill, I don’t intend to treat him like some kind of pariah, just because he’s had to soak up most of everyone’s ire, being the frontman and all.

Necx: OK, enough of railroading Roper. I think you’re tired of answering for him; he needs to answer for himself. Where do you see Runic Games in nine months to a year?

Travis: Where do I see Runic 9 or 10 months from now? Well, #1, I’d like to still exist.
It depends on which route we go, but I’d hope to be getting close to an Alpha with people in and playing together, so that we can be iterating on that.

Project_Xii: You know, in terms of alpha/beta testers, certain members (not all, but that’s up to you) of the Flagshipped crew are probably very good candidates. At least you know we’ll give it to you straight, and not just worship/try to inflate your ego’s. We do WANT games to succeed after all.

Travis: As far as testers go, if they bother to post in the forums, that’s pretty much what you need. You figure at least 80-90% of your testers will treat it like a demo, and never visit the forums or provide feedback. They really just want to play a game. We had plenty of vocal (and sometimes indignantly vocal) members of the Mythos beta testing team. Their input was treated with the same respect as anyone else’s, and a lot of them became less indignant over time as a result.

lonethar: Include me in your testing as well. You have enough testosterone filled testers already. Oh…and I’m almost EXCLUSIVELY a SINGLE PLAYER GAMER!

Travis: I play MMOs solo. I very seldom group. Mythos was extremely soloable, and whatever we do will certainly be the same in that regard. I can’t abide being forced to group.

Project_Xii: That is a promise we’re going to hold you too.

Travis: It’s actually a bullet point on our project pitches.

Necx: Looking at where you’re at currently: do you have a story in mind? Or even a thought about what type of game you will be making? ARPG or MMO? How’s the team feeling about the change?

Travis: As to the game, I’ll be able to better answer in a couple of weeks. As far as the team, we’re all just excited to get back to work. Being unemployed sucks.

Necx: Regarding your thoughts on Diablo 3: would you want to make a game that detailed and storyline driven? Maybe a darker vibe or something?

Project_Xii: I’d like to emphasize the term “storyline” here, due to its importance.

Travis: Yes, lack of story was something that was hugely problematic for Mythos, and something we’d (like to) rectify.

We actually DID write a story after the fact, and it was sort of cool - but we didn’t have enough time to find a way to deliver it (no cutscene budget, or VO budget at that point!). We started sprinkling references in quests, but that’s not enough - you have to set the tone, and carry it through, and at that point with Mythos it wasn’t something we were able to do proper justice with the time we had.

Necx: You mentioned ‘time’: were you under a bubble to launch?

Travis: You are ALWAYS on a deadline. At least if you want to get fed. We were trying to get into open Beta by October, and released by Christmas, and there was plenty to do already.

Necx: What bugged you the most in Mythos?

Travis: Lack of narrative, uninteresting randomized dungeons, art style was too WoW ‘me-too’, quests were not epic enough. Those are some of the things I most want fixed. We were working on some pretty cool dungeon stuff at the time of the shutdown that we will carry on with in a new form.

Necx: Hey, less WoW’ish is a good thing.

Travis: I don’t think our Art team liked it either - it’s just a product of our weird process. We started out 100% outsourced since I was the only dev, and things tended toward WoW-ishness. After a while, you’re stuck with it, and when we started hiring in-house artists, and the project became a ‘real’ one, well, that’s a lot of art to redo.

Necx: Ouch. Why did you accept it (in the first place) then? I would have said “This isn’t what we asked for; stop playing WoW and follow the instructions we wrote”.

Travis: There weren’t a lot of instructions - I was making a six month ‘freebie’ project that that would be over and done with extremely soon. There wasn’t an art lead - we just tried to get ‘art’ made as fast as possible, and, well, that’s the way it turned out. I mean obviously, we cared - but the game didn’t have much identity then, because it wasn’t anything close to what it is now, and I was just making it up as I went along. I didn’t sit around for a month thinking of the kind of theme and look that the game was going to have - it was basically “Go! Quick!”

Necx: I guess they gave you the go ahead to make it a full project, and then boom, you had to sprint. If so the time you had to do what you did was amazing in game standards. So how will this differ on the new project? Still going to outsource, or going to take more time on the art plan?

Travis: We’ll still outsource, but now we have an inhouse art team from day 1. We’ll do preproduction, nail down our style and core story, and THEN outsource to that, with the art team serving as control for the look and feel, and doing main character work and ‘key’ elements.

If you watch the development of Mythos, you can see their influence start to gel the look of the game - it might not have been the look we all wanted, but the consistency began to exert itself - basically, they did what they could.

Necx: Why are so many companies outsourcing nowadays? Is it just so you can work on the story, quests and design more, while they basically lay out the structure and style?

Travis: It’s partly because the expense of producing the content is much greater than it used to be. Sprites = cheap. 3D assets = not so much. For an MMO or an Action-RPG, the sheer NUMBER of assets required for all the unique loot and monsters and props are huge. We just can’t afford to do it all in house. Part of the reason is because the art flow isn’t constant - it comes in waves and spikes, and then there’s a lull. If you have lulls and you have an ENORMOUS art team that is building your assets, then you have long periods where not everybody is working and you’re just burning cash. With outsourcing, you’re only paying for the hours required to make the assets (basically - it isn’t quite as simple as that).

That’s not to say I wouldn’t love to do all the art in-house - it’s just not financially feasible unless you can find a way to keep everybody fully occupied at all times, which is really, really difficult to do. What do you do once you’ve shipped the game and are only doing ongoing content? If your art needs have cut in half, do you lay off half your artists? Yuck. I want to keep my whole team.

Necx: Thoughts on that: if they come back with something you don’t like, do you have options to send it back or are you dealt the cards you are given?

Travis: Yes, you do - it has to be managed though, which is why you need an in-house art team, and in many cases, an outsourcing manager. You usually don’t get the assets ‘completed’ - you get to see their progress and comment. You’re paying by the hour, not the asset, most of the time - so it’s your time to burn.

That’s why it is important to have good conception, and to get on the same page as your outsourcing team, so that you don’t burn a lot of money going back and forth. You want to be in a place where everybody ‘gets’ what the right thing is most of the time.

Necx: How long does that process take?

Travis: The process of making an asset, or the process of getting on the same page as your contracting house? Per asset, obviously it’s pretty different from thing to thing - modeling a sword vs a character, there’s a wide range there. It gets down to polygon count, whether it has to be rigged, texture size, whether it needs normal mapping, spec maps, etc. As far as a contractor, it depends on the contractor - it took us a month or two with our last art contractor to get it nailed down. We hope to use them again, so that should make it go quicker this time out.

Necx: And one final odd ball question: your favorite game of all time?

Travis: Toss up between Cave Story, Wasteland, and (predictably)The Ocarina of Time. I’ll probably change my mind tomorrow. Planescape:Torment came dangerously close. As did Super Metroid. Wasteland will never get knocked off the top 3 though.

Necx: Well, once again, thanks Travis for your time. And everyone at Runic Games; Good luck on your new upcoming project!

Other Assorted Info - A Timeline on Mythos

Here is how Mythos came about and was developed, to the best of my memory.

• I (Travis) was offered a job working on Hellgate. I couldn’t afford to move to San Francisco at the time, so I had to decline

• 3 or 4 months later, Phil Shenk and I had the idea to do a small little game for fun, just as a hobby

• The idea arose internally at Flagship to do a test project to make sure that the networking for Hellgate could shoulder a large player population. Phil brought up the fact that we’d been working on something small, and they already knew who I was and had offered me a job prior. Because I made FATE, it seemed like a good idea to bring me on to do Mythos as a short, 6 month test project that would be released for free to test out the networking.

• I started work in October, nearly 3 years ago. The project was built on the Hellgate codebase (so that it could in fact test out the networking) - after about 4 months we really liked the game, and wanted to make it a real project.

• 6 months in I hired 3 people. We moved to a small office and kept working on Mythos. We forked the code.

• We slowly added a few people. We go to Alpha. I merge changes back and forth between the codebases manually during all this time. This is extraordinarily painful.

• We later decide to merge the codebases back together because doing the additions and fixes back and forth by hand is ridiculously time consuming. This too is extraordinarily painful and takes over a month to do. As a result inside the code there are large portions of shared stuff (stats system, networking, basic room stuff, layout, random generation systems, etc.) and then big branches that are unique to each game (Mythos renders everything a lot differently and has line of sight stuff, pathing is actually used for players and works substantially differently between the games, combat works differently in many ways, etc. etc. etc.)

• Hellgate is released, and Mythos goes to Beta shortly thereafter

• Hellgate and Mythos both continue work. Engineers and artists STAY on their respective projects.

• Cellwind moves up to Seattle, and continues the exact same work from here.

• Mythos Overworld release

• Shutdown

Full interview is available here. It’s worth a read as some much anticipated games are discussed while the EAp talking head does a good job of sounding like the EA top brass actually care about video games beyond the profits. To save you the time of slogging through much of the text, here’s the parts on the HGL Super Suck from EA’s POV…

Gamasutra:
Over the last eighteen months, EAP has undergone something of a renaissance, putting the group more out in the open than it ever has been. Top-down directives from recently-appointed CEO John Riccitiello have stressed new degrees of studio autonomy throughout the organization — policies that have allowed EA Partners to attract top-shelf independent developers who historically would have balked at the idea of partnering with the megalithic publisher.

Last year, it released The Orange Box from notoriously independent Valve, Rock Band from Harmonix Music Systems, and Crysis from Crytek — but also the less successful Hellgate: London from now-all-but-defunct Flagship Studios.

Gamasutra sat down for an in-depth interview with group general manager DeMartini to discuss the recent deals as well as EAP’s overall philosophy, its understanding that not all development must originate from EA, its Metacritic scores compared to EA’s internal projects, and where Hellgate: London went wrong.

[…]

But, for example, Flagship and Hellgate: London did basically implode. Should you have stepped in more?

DD: Yeah, I mean… We’re certainly sad with the results for Flagship and what’s happened with Hellgate, because at the time we signed it, we were trying to get involved in a very complicated relationship between Namco and Flagship. We were coming late to the party, and trying to do whatever we could to sprinkle the game magic on the project and get it headed in the right direction.

I think that’s an example where all three parties had the best interest of the game in mind, and sometimes the game doesn’t work out. Hellgate is still an incredible concept. The guys who worked on it spent thousands of hours trying to make that concept work, and sometimes we just don’t see something. Sometimes, we just didn’t take enough time. Sometimes, things don’t work out the way you expect.

It’s kind of like a film with all big stars — on the script, it should be successful, but the movie doesn’t turn out as good as everybody hoped. That’s why EAP takes a portfolio approach with its games. You have to place a lot of bets, and hope for a lot of hits.

Were you actually funding it, or were you just marketing and distributing, or what?

DD: We were co-publishing with Namco. I’m not going to dodge a bullet — we had people who were actively working with them on the title. We thought it would have been slightly higher quality than it turned out to be, and I think the problem with the game was that by the time it got really good, we were four to six months post-release. That was too late; we’d lost the fanbase.

It was strictly an issue of the gameplay and game quality needing to be higher at the start. Unfortunately, Flagship was in a situation where they weren’t in a position to hold the game any longer, and the situation kind of took over.

Bill Roper said this week that there were conversations about EA acquiring the studio. Was that a serious discussion?

DD: I can’t really comment on any kind of acquisition conversation. I know I wasn’t involved in any of them.

How do EA Partners titles perform relative to the larger EA catalogue?

DD: The average Metacritic for the EAP titles was higher than EA’s overall average Metacritic last year. Obviously, [that’s] buoyed by great titles like Rock Band, The Orange Box, and Crytek’s Crysis — those three titles were all 90+ rated titles. We had a huge string of good fortune with some of the best partners in the industry.

With regards to sales, we were delighted by how all the EAP properties did. The notable exceptions would probably be Ninja Reflex and Hellgate: London.

[…]

Looks like even EA Got Flagshipped!

For a take on how the remaining players of Hellgate London are taking the news read the EA’s view on Hellgate message thread on the official HGL forum.

Such was the case yesterday when a few of the handful of remaining Hellgate London Staff created an impromptu, stock content driven, event on the the Live (non-test) US Sever, word is still out on how many high level hardcore (one life, perma-death) characters were slaughter without warning. While this event was simply a couple of admins manually spawning boss mobs in various maps, the backend code running the game servers took it as a sign of the coming apocalyptic final shutdown and responsed by taking everyone to Tronsville until yet another manual restart was required as per the usual fix these days when things go wrong.

Rather than take this insta-”event” at face value, The Happening was posted on the still standing (thanks Bandai Namco!) Official HGL Forum by a player presenting this unprofessional screwing around on the same level as if another million dollar plus round of funding had occurred…

Hey guys.

I don’t know if I am supposed to post this, but judging by what Tiggs said, that we’d fill everyone in, I think it may be safe.

HGL ain’t dead.

I was just on live, in a mysterious ‘test’ with an entity known as Panda.

We ran some ‘test’ scenarios about some future things.
Like perhaps survival modes, maybe a raid thing, maybe a tiered challenge mode with a boss.

This is 100% no BS, and am getting pictures uploaded.

We had like 40 Sydonais in Devon Shire square,
4 Molochs in the Wilds, waves of enemies.

Someone has the reigns folks.

HGL IS ALIVE.

Pic #1 Test:

Pic #2 Test (for better forums size, am no forum whiz here kids)

A few posts later, a logic driven player tried their best to inject some reality…

Sounds more like A gm screwing around before the game bites the dust.

Pages worth of posts followed, from extreme die-hard fans to the most hyper critical, one things was certain, this was big news to many if only for the reason nothing has happened inside the actual game for months! No patches, no live events, hell only active subscribers at the time of the big layoffs, when the subscriber page “broke” can access sub only areas.

Basic as this spawning may be, it sorta worked for IAHGames, least a couple of months, when trying to keep their tiny number of remaining players interested while being (to this day) stuck at version 0.7.

Beyond the hardcore fanboy irrationality on this happening making such a thing out to be much more than even Tiggs said it was, it illustrates how bad of a decision it was to remove scheduled events from the game. MMORPG and scheduled events for real life holidays and other occasions go hand it in hand. Even summoning up extra mobs for the weekend would, for at least some players, would be a reason to load up HGL.

Yet another decision made by the FSS Team to try and maximize profits!

From a dev chat, in January of this year, well before everyone got fired and money was all spent…

<DevBot> [SF]Ayana :asks: We missed the x-mas event that we thought was going to happen… What ingame events are planned for this year?

[16:53] <Bogustus> As you guys have seen, we have had a real challenge getting holiday events to happen.

[16:54] <Bogustus> The difficulty is that it creates a hard deadline when builds have to be completed. Also, it requires that we make a bunch of content that goes away after a couple days.

[16:54] <Bogustus> We are trying to stop rushing builds, and we are focusing on content that will stay around for a long time.

[16:55] <Bogustus> I feel bad about it. I wish that we had more time and resources to work on it, but I think that it is the best choice right now.

Yet again $$$$ > Customers Enjoyment

Followup on this fail being discussed on the Flagshipped.com Forums, http://www.flagshipped.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=414

http://hellforge.gameriot.com/blogs/Hel … Interview/

Here’s a few of the choice questions, rest can be read by following the above link.

Who among the team is joining you, are there any people from FSS?
We’ve hired back all of the original Seattle team, and Max Schaefer from San Francisco is onboard as well. He’s been effectively on the Mythos team for quite some time already.

What types of games are you planning to design?
We thought we were headed in the right direction with Mythos - I think our collective desire is to do that type of game right and get it out the door.

If you had unlimited resources what’s one specific game idea you’d really like to put forward and make?
Apart from relocating to the Caribbean?
In a world of unlimited resources, I’d want to build a game with the incredible depth and consistent surprise of Nethack, and the polish and presentation that Blizzard is known for. I have a feeling that’s what a lot of people want.

http://hellforge.gameriot.com/blogs/Hel … Interview/

Also a new Flagshipped.com message forum is now available for the discussion of this new company made entirely of former Flagship Studio Members from the Mythos dev team.

Flagshipped Forum » From The Creators of Diablo… » Runic Games (Ex-FSS Seattle Team)

• Employees were not paid for their last two weeks work. Bill Roper himself promised the employees in a meeting that everyone would be paid including what was owed to them.

• Employees were not paid out for retroactive raises that were to kick in from April and paid out on that last pay check

• Employees were not reimbursed for any outstanding dental bills or gym receipts per their benefits package

• Some contractors were paid (those that were with an agency) other contractors were not paid for their last two weeks.

• Some Employees were given information on the studios situation more then 30 days prior to the closing

• The closing down of the studio happened spur of the moment due to rumors that the funding didn’t go through. To many it seemed like FSS would have tried to go on even longer then they could had this rumor not started to float around that Thursday night.

• Cobra insurance was not offered as originally stated in the lay-off emails. It was later found out that legally cobra only was offered if there were employees receiving benefts left at the business. This came to a shock to many employees especially those that just had babies.

• Forums were run by the Marcom team. After Beta the Contractors/Moderators (Tiggs Minions) were not allowed to post outside of the tech support forums unless it was an emergency or they were locking a post per Scapes direction.

• Scapes was on an alert post spree despite his Marcom team telling him to focus on other duties. Scapes would alert 20+ posts a night. Scapes would tell moderators how to handle the posts if no action was taken then Scapes would delete the post or ban the user. Moderators/Contractors are taking the fall for someone that had no clue about a community. Scapes saw to it that no one from the CS Team (Tiggs and her minions) would ever be seen in the public eye. Marcom and CS had very serious issues and the two teams did not get along despite efforts to bring them together. Tiggs may come across very strong willed but she knows communities and answers questions. Much more then Scapes has ever done. Scapes would ban forum posters from the forums without following procedures (3 strike rule and then a time out). Mass bannings and deletions of threads were done by Scapes on the forums leading to arguments between the two teams in the days leading after the layoffs.

• Contractors/Moderators and Tiggs volunteered for up to two weeks after the news broke and removed (dethroned) Scapes ability to moderator. They are now working for NB under Mig Squared - Tiggs Company

• Mismanaged money was an understatement - Yoga at the office, Daily Lunches, Dinners, Beer/Wine, Xbox 360 and games, Wii and games, First Class Air Fare, the entire studio going to the movies, employees having full realm of using company credit cards, even a company picnic that unfortunately was the weekend after the layoffs. If a company isn’t doing well you tighen the purse strings! You weren’t on Blizzard’s budget anymore

• Large office space was opened in Austin that was barely used

• The billing application not working lost revenue for FSS

• Rumors have it that Former Seattle employees that are now employed by Runic games have been paid out their lost wages.

• Many former employees are having trouble obtaining unemployment due to FSS not responding to inquiries made by California and Texas unemployment offices.

• The letter on flagshipped from the board of directors is legit

• The other letter has two versions, one for Flagship people and One for Ping0 people.

• The California office had invited select people to the office after the layoffs to meet representatives from Hanbitsoft to discuss further career opportunities.

• The California office worked with other companies to introduce former employees for employment. This was not extended to the Seattle or Austin office.

This source tells us that ex employees are VERY unhappy about people coming to us with this info….this is what our source has to say about that.

“Some former employees are upset that you’re being given this information. The way I look at it is they should be more upset that people worked and weren’t paid. People banked PTO with the hopes of taking longer vacations and that is lost. People trusted to be reimbursed for benefits they received through the company and that didn’t happen.. Retroactive raises were promised and never paid out. The people that worked did what was expected and more and should be paid for what was promised by the company and by Bill in a meeting. Those former employees that are upset that you have the information can go F themselves. We have families to feed, new babies to take care of, mortgages and high California rents to be paid. You can easily tell FSS that you don’t need the money but most of us do need it.”

We were also given a copy of the Ping0 version of the termination letter..it reads along the same lines as the one for employess of FSS.

July 20, 2008

To all former Flagship/Ping0 Employees:

The Board of Directors regrets to inform you that the final payroll has not
yet been paid out as of today.  We are doing everything we can to get the
final payroll paid to our employees.  At this time it is likely that the
company will file for bankruptcy.  In that case, employee claims will be the
top priority on the list of debts of the company.
You will receive your W-2 after year end.  If your address changes between
now and then, please contact ********** at ***-***-**** to let them
know your new address.

Sincerely,
Flagship Studios/Ping0

The source also tells us that at FSS founding parties, instead of talking about future gameplay or art, they’d look at luxury car catalogs to see what kind of things they’d get with their money. The source also tells us that individually the brass there weren’t all bad but they played off each others worst traits, ignoring problems, self satisfied and appointing the least qualified to key positions in the company.

This explains quite a bit in my opinion, and as I said you can take take this with a grain of salt if you’d like, but we stand by our source.

There will be more to come of this I hope…..there are many questions to be asked and many that we hope to have answered. On that note I leave you with what sold us that we have a legitimate source here. The scanned copy of the termination letter issued to the employees on July 11, 2008. Stay tuned guys…we hope to have more info coming in the near future.

.

—

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 c