Flagship Breaks Radio Silence — 1UP Interviews CEO Bill Roper

Tue, Aug 19, 2008

On Thursday, amidst an in-depth interview with former COO Max Schaefer and Mythos lead designer Travis Baldree, GameCyte learned that Flagship Studios was truly shutting its doors for good. To use a tired analogy, the news spread like wildfire — but one consumer gaming publication failed to report this turn of events. Why? Because when it comes to news on Flagship Studios’ closure, they were sitting on the motherlode. Yesterday evening, 1UP published an exclusive eight-page interview with CEO Bill Roper.

No excerpt or summary can really do Roper’s story justice, because like the snipers at Flagshipped like to say, the story of Flagship Studios really is one of epic fail — and Roper gives up his guts so utterly that most every paragraph holds some gem for those fans still searching for answers. But since you’re still reading these words, I’ll attempt to gather the most salient facts for your convenience. Just follow the jump…

Roper Reveals:

Flagship’s board of directors paid out of pocket to keep the project going:

“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 [...] I had to basically liquidate 401(k)s to pay people’s salaries.”

Flagship failed primarily because there weren’t enough funds for ongoing development; subscription fees were just enough to keep the games up and running:

“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 wasn’t really enough revenues coming in to cover the expected and required development costs.”

Hanbitsoft and Flagship were on great terms until T3 took over:

“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.”

Hanbitsoft has the right to collect the Mythos IP, but has not yet done so:

“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.”

Comerica controls not only the Hellgate IP and source code, but all related technology — the “core” of Flagship — and is trying to sell it off:

“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. [...Comerica holds the] 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.”

Roper expects T3 Entertainment’s new SF studio will have trouble working on Mythos going forward, as former Flagship staff are refusing to work with them:

“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. [...] 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.”

Not just Namco, EA is also involved in ongoing support for Hellgate: London:

“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.”

All this and much, much more, at 1UP.com.

Image Credit: GamersGate.com, under Creative Commons 2.0 Germany