I imagine anyone who reads this site and cares about computer games has long since seen this news, but Flagship Studios is all but dead, and the people who built it have largely scattered to the winds. The first big group to (officially) start something new are the Flagship North guys, who were developing HGL's bastard stepchild, Mythos. (Which I always type "Muythos," for some semi-typo reason. That's Spanish for Verythos, if you're even less bilingual than me. Which wouldn't be a terrible name for a video game, actually.)
Mythos is gone from them since the intellectual property is owned by one of Flagship's creditors, and the entire (small) Flagship North team has moved on to found Runic Games. It's headed up by Travis Baldree, the former lead designer on Mythos, and Max Schaefer, one of the creators of the Diablo series, former head of Blizzard North, and founder if Flagship Studios. Max's brother Erich is also semi-officially part of their team, and they sound pretty likely to hire a few other Flagship refugees.
If you want more info about it, here are two recommended reads. This interview on IncGamers was mostly written by me. Rush asked me to provide some questions, and while I was in the middle of working up questions for the
Ben Boos' Swords interview I took 10 minutes to brainstorm/type out some questions for the Runic Games guys. Rush added two more and sent them off, and while I didn't think much about them at the time, when I read the replies a couple of days later I found myself wincing. My co-workers told me they didn't think the questions were harsh, but they felt pretty merciless to me, on the reread. Perhaps only because the
first four were directly probing inquiries about why the last three years of Travis' work had just been flushed down the toilet, thanks to the company-running incompetence of his semi-bosses. Here are the first two questions, which at least cut through the BS.
What happened with Mythos? The IP was sold and you guys have moved on?
At present the Mythos IP is held in such a way that we have no access to it. It seems the best move for our team to dive straight into developing a new product, and put to use all that we've learned from the development of Mythos. This has an added advantage for us in that the Mythos IP really grew a little oddly over the course of development, given its inception as a network test. Starting anew gives us an opportunity to do the story and setting elements right, and with input from the whole team right at the outset.
Do you know if a new team is going to continue development of Mythos, and release it?
At present I just don't know if that's going to happen. I will say that picking up work after the fact and taking it to completion is an extremely difficult task - there is a lot of shared knowledge in a game development team that exists there organically, and it's hard to go through rediscovery on a project of this complexity with a new crew. I don't have any real inside information, however.
There was another interview posted a couple of days later, and it
reads like the transcript of a phone call, which allows more back and forth conversation. It's got more talk about what went wrong with Flagship, and is equally non-PR bullshiting.
And you say Flagship Studios did close?
TB: Max, are they still kind of open?
MS: It’s barely open. It’s just open enough to take care of the final affairs, but for all intents and purposes it’s closed down.
GameCyte: We'd figured as much, but all we'd had was a press release saying "We're still open! We still have our IP!" It's hard to tell what's actually going on.
TB: It's a little bit of a new experience for all of us. (chuckles) We don't exactly know the 'proper' way to close down a company. First and foremost, we're just trying to take care of the debts and the employees in an orderly fashion, so Bill [Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios] and one or two other people have stuck around and are doing their best to get that done before we move on in different directions.
Sad for it all to end so badly, but as they say, everything ends badly, or it would keep going. At least I didn't waste a year and a half of my life working on something related to that company, only to receive zero return for my efforts.
Oh wait...
Labels: flagship studios, Hellgate: London
