Tradition dictates that the captain go down with his ship, and so we find it unsurprising that the good Captain Black might swear his last clinging desperately to the tiller — but that doesn’t mean his shipmates have to undergo the same fate. Server engineers have been snapped up by former Hellgate distributor Electronic Arts. We hear a programmer found shelter in the Infinity Ward. And now, the entire Flagship Seattle team responsible for Mythos has rechristened their lifeboat “Runic Games.”
Spotted by Blue’s News early yesterday morning, the new Runic Games website is currently blank, save this single press release revealing the studio’s founders:
Seattle, Washington - August 8th, 2008 - The former Flagship Studios Seattle team is proud to announce their reformation as Runic Games (www.runicgames.com). As the team responsible for the highly-anticipated Mythos at Flagship Studios, Runic Games intends to continue to use their expertise in the Action-RPG MMO genre to create the best games in this market.
The studio is headed by Travis Baldree and Max Schaefer. Travis served as Project Director for Mythos at Flagship Seattle, and previously created the bestselling Action-RPG FATE. Max was the Executive Producer for Mythos, and one of the original founders of Blizzard North, the creators of the bestselling Diablo franchise. He was also one of the founding members of Flagship Studios.
Announcements about Runic Games’ forthcoming projects will be made in the coming days.
A quick Whois search determined that the Runic Games domain name was registered very recently, on the first of August; and unlike the websites for Ping-0, Hellgate London, Mythos, and Flagship Studios proper, Runic Games is not running on Ping-0 domain name servers.
For those following the ever-secretive Flagship saga, this brief announcement leaves much to be desired; but we’re pleased to inform you we’ve secured an interview with both of the newly christened studio heads, so stay tuned; we’ll have more details for you shortly.
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