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A new studio called Runic Games has arisen from the ashes of Flagship Studios’ demise. I managed to get a hold of Travis Baldree, founder and president of Runic Games and formerly the creator of Mythos, to ask him a few things about his new studio and the plans he has in store for it.
Check it out here.
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.
For more information about Runic Games, or for inquiries about potential partnerships, please contact us at press@runicgames.com.
Just before the official Mythos forums went offline, Max Schaefer posted a personal thank you to all the fans and players of Mythos:
They say it’s not so much the destination as it is the journey that’s important. We’re really hoping that’s the case around here these days. I can’t really believe I’m writing a post like this, but here we are faced with the unpleasant task of taking a hiatus from this crazy project. Unlike most games, Mythos has been running with our testing community for almost its whole life. I really feel like we’ve all done this together. And despite this bump in the road, I think we’ve succeeded wildly. This is undoubtedly the best game community I’ve ever seen. This is the best game development team in the world, in both Seattle and San Francisco. The things we’ve learned here, and with you all, will be with us forever.
PC gaming is changing, and I believe we’ve had a sneak preview with Mythos. With any luck, this will not be a long hiatus, and Mythos will be back. But even if it’s not, and even if we all move on, we’ve taken a lot of important steps forward. Game development is in many ways a continuum, and we all build on what came before. I know neither Travis, the great Mythos dev team, nor myself are planning on doing anything but make games into the future. So no matter what, we’ll pick up where we left off and you’ll be hearing from us shortly. We may not be the best business people on the planet , but we know how to make games. And once the dust settles here, that’s what we hope to get right back to doing as soon as possible. So until then, aux revoir Mythos community! It’s truly been a privilege to have experienced this with you.
Max Schaefer, your humble executive producer
Diane “Tiggs” Migliaccio contacted me with the following news on behalf of Flagship Studios with regards to Mythos.
Travelers of Uld,
We, the ancient elders of Uld are issuing this warning to all citizens and travelers. Hurry! The great darkness that once plagued Uld is returning. Everyone is ordered to close down their shops and prepare. We predict the when night is at its peak the darkness will arrive. The ancient elders of Uld will be leaving immediately in order to preserve the lore of this wonderful world. Citizens please prepare thyself and know that the elders will be back from their travels some day.
From the team:
We regretfully announce that on Friday, July 18, 2008 at 11:59 CST the world of Uld known as Mythos will be going on hiatus. On behalf of all of the Devs and Community team we want to say thank you to everyone for their support and assistance with Mythos Alpha and Beta testing and we will see you soon.
The Mythos Team
Travis Baldree, Project Lead and Programmer on Mythos created a thread on the official Mythos forum to bid his farewells to the Mythos community and other members of the Mythos team have since added their heartfelt goodbyes to the thread.
Well, it’s an interesting few days here for all of us. It’s just been killing me not to post until now, but I really needed to wait until some things were settled and announced. As you may or may not know Flagship Studios laid off almost all employees effective friday - you should be able to see the press release in the Announcements. Now, on the face of it, that really does sound like the end of Mythos as we know it - but we have a tight-knit team that feels like family and hopes to stick together. Unfortunately, I can’t speak at any real length about our immediate plans just yet - but let’s say that we hope to have you back up and Beta testing for us in one way or another sometime soon.
You’ve been an incredible community that we’ve all felt priveleged to be a part of, and we’re not quite ready to let go of that little family just yet. No matter the outcome, this has been a fantastic experience, and I and the team would like to thank each and every one of you for the tireless hours of testing and discussion you’ve undergone, and the uniquely friendly community spirit that you all helped foster. It’s been a treat every step of the way.
So, I’m not exactly sure how long Mythos in its current form will remain up, since it is effectively a testing server. I’ll try to get you that information as soon as I can.
In the meantime, I know the rest of the team would love to post their farewells and thanks to all of you. We’ll try to keep you as up to date as we can in one way or another.Thanks again to all of you - and I hope to be seeing all of you online again very, very soon.
Travis
Others of Flagship Studios who have contributed their farewells and goodbyes to the thread include:
Greg Brown
Thanks everyone.
It has been a pleasure to be a part of this game and this community. Like Travis said, it has been very difficult to sit aside and read these forums and not be able to comment or shed light. Thank you for your dedication to helping us create and improve this game. We will miss it.
This is not the last you will hear from us. Take care and good gaming.
-Greg
Jason “Grimby” Beck
I definitely want to echo Travis’ sentiments about this community. It’s truly amazing how friendly, helpful, and open it was. It’s been a very rare experience and one that we all enjoyed tremendously.
I really can’t say enough about this team, either. I’ve known some of these guys for years now and it’s a real joy to work with friends everyday. The entire team is easily the best I’ve been apart of. It’s just a cool group of people who happen to be both easy to work with and really good at what they do.
I’m quite certain you’ll be hearing from us soon. It’s very sad to see Mythos (as we know it) go…I got pretty attached to them Ramalos…, but we’ll be doing something again.
Thanks for all the cool comments. It was rough reading up on everything without being able to respond.
It’s been a treat!Cheers,
Jason
Kyle “Skycrickett” Cornelius
I am just going to quote Jason since he pretty much hit the nail on the head. It sucks having to leave without finishing this project up… but I guess thats how things happen sometimes. I am proud to have contributed to Mythos, and really hope that you guys see us in some incarnation in the future. As a former member of the community - turned professional scribbler, I can say it was a pleasure to have you guys testing our game.
-Kyle
Adam Perin
It is a sad day to lose such a great community. I hope in the future we will be so lucky as to have such a great community again. I personally will miss seeing such great community interaction (with us and with eachother) and genuienly helpful people on teh interwebs that are trying to help us make something even better than what we planned.
-adam
Taylor Balbi
I’ve said it a million times. You guys are the best. In all the years that I have worked with communities, paid and for fun, this is by far the greatest group of people ever. You guys were always very supportive, very kind, and seriously…. it killed me that I didn’t get to ban anyone lol. You guys were always ready for new stuff and rarely complained about bugs and features, great group of supporters. There were just so many people who loved Mythos and helped make it the game it is today. Whether Mythos picks up in the future or not, you guys rock. I will be around in one way or another.
If the opportunity arises I would love to have the chance to work on Mythos again. The main reason is you guys. Thanks for being there and always supporting us. It really meant a lot to us every time you sent in e-mails or messages about how much you love the game and can’t put it down.
No matter the future of Mythos, you know that you can count on me to be around any project Travis and the gang works on. See you around guys, it was a good run and the best job I ever had.
History will, perhaps, remember Mythos as one of those “great games that should have been”, along with Black Isle Studios’ Van Buren and Troika’s post-apocalyptic RPG. Hope may yet exist for the game, so we’ll be crossing our fingers for a miracle.
Flagship’s Community Manager, Taylor Balbi, has revealed to VE3D that all Ping0 and Flagship Studios staff have been made redundant. According to Taylor and the VE3D article, employees were notified at a company meeting and subsequently informed that the offices will be officially closed on Saturday. The source went on to reveal that three of the studio’s top brass dug into their own pockets to provide 30 days of pay to all employees.
As mentioned earlier, word of the studio’s closure reached HanbitSoft, leading to an early press release regarding the control over the Hellgate: London intellectual property that lead to a stern rebuttal from an official source in Flagship Studios, which, subsequently lead to a HanbitSoft lawyer posting the following sentence on our very website: “It is unfortunate that Flagship turned down additional investments HanbitSoft offered to make that would have allowed it to keep its doors open.”
As also referenced in the legal release, HanbitSoft hopes to independently continue development of Mythos, to which it owns the rights thanks to a loan agreement enacted with Flagship. Comerica now owns the Hellgate: London rights through a similar loan agreement, and will likely continue Asian development with HanbitSoft. As for English-language releases of the two games, it is possible that the Asian companies would continue development, but the fate of the US, Japanese and European version of Hellgate: London remain a mystery.
In short, Flagship’s time has run out, and all intellectual property may have been lost, all staff fired, and the studio closed. Flagship, we hardly knew ye…
Further Confirmation: A person going by the name of GLC who is claiming to be a former employee of Ping0 has made the following post on SomethingAwful to further confirm the company’s demise:
Former Ping0 employee checking in here. I feel bad for some of the talented guys on the staff who busted rear end to try and get a game out on a ridiculous schedule, but I think we all kind of saw this coming after the game came out and basically bombed. Flagship bit off way more than they could chew and made a lot of development and structural mistakes in how they went about things. They had a lot of big dreamers on staff, but not enough nitty-gritty people who knew how to get shit done. It sucks, but that’s life I guess. I didn’t always agree with the decisions of the leadership, but it doesn’t surprise me at all to hear that three of them (probably Roper and the Schaeffers) dug into their own pockets to pay people. Nothing about them, Max Schaeffer in particular, ever made me think they were less than standup guys.
I think it’s less that they aimed too high than that they tried to aim that high and do it quickly, and they didn’t do anything the easy way. They had their own server architecture, their own client, their own chat, their own graphics engine, their own everything basically. Plus they wanted a game that could support thousands of concurrent connections with no downtime, had an engaging single-player campaign, and could support an ongoing, persistent world. It was like picking everything that’s hard to do in a game, and then putting it on a brand-new company (two of them, really) with people who hadn’t worked together before.
Plus you had Ping0 doing the back-end and multiplayer, working off a forked codebase, and trying to make sure that what they were designing was open enough that it could be marketed to other companies. And then Mythos, with a team working out of Seattle under Travis Baldtree (who is a fucking genius, by the way), which had to fit into things somehow even though it wasn’t as much of a priority. It was just a really chaotic situation all around. Hopefully the talented guys I met there will bounce back quickly, it’s a lovely time to be unemployed in the bay area.
Update: Guy Somberg, along with Amol Deshpande, Chris Schillinger, Jesse Jones and Ray Li list their Flagship-Ping0 positions as having ended in July 2008.
Kotaku’s closure story contains further confirmation from their own anonymous source.
Amol Deshpande, Chris Schillinger, Jesse Jones and Ray Li all list their Flagship-Ping0 positions as having ended in July 2008.
Update: The official forum appears to be no longer moderated is inundated in spam.
Update: Programmer Producer Patrick Harris now has his positions at Flagship Studios listed as ‘past jobs’ and is no longer employed at Flagship Studios.
Update: Eric Liu is no longer in the employ of Flagship-Ping0. Having served for seven months as a QA Manager and Automation Engineer, he was promoted in October 2007 to International Producer, a position he held until the studio’s closure.
Update: Flagship-Ping0’s IT Manager, Brent Shinn, Grant Watters, Greg Brown and Jonathan McEvoy are the latest Flagship-Ping0 employees to have listed their positions as previous experience on LinkedIn.
Update: Flagship-Ping0’s Project Manager, Jack Wood, is now also an ex-employee. Jack had many important responsibilities, including: stakeholder, investor and regional distributor liaising; final say on all patch and product launches; and oversight of day-to-day end user support.
Update: Lead Graphics Engineer, Chris Lambert, is the latest to go. Chris was with the company for four years.
Update: With the help of one of our readers, we discovered that the poster going by the name of GLC on SomethingAwful is none other than one “Kalan Kier”, former Ping0 QA Manager.
According to GLC’s Something Awful user profile, his AIM screen name is “kkieratnl”.
A quick search on Google for “kkieratnl” reveals an archived forum post by GLC.
In the archived forum post, GLC states that his e-mail address is “kalankier@gmail.com“.
A further search on LinkedIn for “Kalan Kier” reveals that according to Kalan Kier’s LinkedIn profile, he was never a Ping0 employee. However, the LinkedIn Directory appears to have cached his former profile’s headline which indicates that he served as a QA Manager at Ping0.
Update: Diane “Tiggs” Migliaccio claims that Hellgate players won’t be charged even if they are unable to unsubscribe due to the feature’s removal from account pages and is locking discussions related to the very subject, subsequently directing them to a ‘main thread’, in which she allows spam and posts her own; preventing any serious discussion from taking place.
Coincidentally, Diane publicly launched her own community support company the day after Flagship’s closure was made public.
Update: Community Manager Taylor Balbi publically denies having anything to do with the statement that was made to VE3D.
“Nothing Official has been stated about what is going on, everything you see or hear is speculation and rumors.”
Hey there fellow Mythonians.
Are you tired of having to pester Flagship Studios for small tidbits of news about the game?
Are you bored of not having any recent exclusives?
Are you eager to hear about some new and exciting information about Mythos?
If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you’ve come to the right place!
That’s right! We here at Mythos Guru have gone out of our way to do the job for you. You won’t have to wait in line to get one measly question answered. You won’t have to leave your kids alone in the car, baking under the hot sun, as you dash to your news press to find the latest goss on the game only to find a police officer waiting for you with a warrant and a pair of silver handcuffs when you return. You won’t have to sit there doodling words and pictures on your wall hoping they will be the new exclusives for Mythos.
All you simply have to do is feast your eyes upon our wonderous interview with the amazing Max (Note: Max may or may not actually be amazing, but the interview is indeed wonderful!). Not only do you get exclusive new information at Mythos Guru about the game’s upcoming new modes of transportation, brand new ways to live and die, new ways to dress and express, as well as the secret race that was going to be put in until Max was abducted!!!
You will see the answers to these questions and more by read not one, two, or even five, but twenty four whole questions that will make you wish that you could hibernate until open beta!
So what the hell are we talking about? Read the Exclusive Interview with Max Schaefer and find out!
Enjoy 
Scapes has posted a few bits of news on the official forums regarding patches. First is the news of patch 1.3c coming to the live servers tomorrow.
Hellgate: London Patch 1.3c will be live on the Shulgoth (US) and Sydonai (EU) servers tomorrow. This is the same build of Patch 1.3c that is currently on Test Center. The Shulgoth (US) server will update tomorrow, June 3rd, at 6:00 AM PDT. The Sydonai (EU) server will update later tomorrow at 8:00 PM PDT (0300 GMT). The downtime for each server will be about one hour.
Patch notes for Patch 1.3c will be available tomorrow after the launch.
– Scapes
Second is the news of no ETA for patch 2.
There presently isn’t an ETA for when the Abyss Chronicles will be live on the Test Center server. An announcement will be made when there is one to share.
– Scapes
Enjoy
IGN’s website, RPG Vault, has started a new section recently titled “Focus” where they invite a few leading industry developers to talk about an issue. While there isn’t anything strictly Hellgate or Mythos related in the article, one of the developers invited is from Flagship Studios.
Today, the “focus” discussion was about RPGs and the genre that certain games belong to, as well as how RPGs have changed over the years. The two industry developers today were Steve Bauman, the associate producer at Gas Powered Games (which incidently is making Demigod which you can read about on DemigodGuru) as well as Max Schaefer, who is the Co-Founder and COO of Flagship Studios.
In 1993, Max Schaefer, brother Erich and friend David Brevik co-founded Condor, which became Blizzard North when acquired in 1996. He served as Vice President of Blizzard North and a Director of Blizzard before the same trio plus Bill Roper and David Williams started Flagship Studios in 2003. Some of his credits include Diablo, Diablo II, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos and Hellgate: London.
The article talks about Max’s previous games like Diablo as well as other games in the genre.
The very first test we did at the beginning of the Diablo project was to make a guy with a mace, a simple dungeon, and a skeleton. We set it up so if you clicked the on skeleton, the guy would walk over and whack him one. It was a “lightning in a bottle’ moment, and there was no question we were on to something big. Instead of instructing my character to hit something, I just did it with my mouse click. Everyone could enjoy this! It’s a theory we’ve continued with our current title, Mythos, an action RPG if there ever was one.
So for me, the term action RPG was invented to refer to those games that concentrate on the visceral, graphic imagery and action of the genre. The emphasis is more on battle than lore. All the trappings can be there - the leveling, the stats, the magic loot, the crafting, the questing… It’s just that there tends to be less emphasis on dialogue, story or role-playing.
[...]
However, take the example of the 500-pound gorilla in the room, World of Warcraft. People generally agree it’s a classic RPG, but in reality, it’s also an action RPG: playing it takes a good amount of dexterity, there’s a decent amount of action, and there’s more an overall context than there is a specific story. But if there’s any title that defines the RPG market, and influences how developers must approach the genre, it’s World of Warcraft.
While many have tried, it’s probably futile to try to be a WoW-killer. Not only did the game have great talent with a virtually unlimited budget and timeline, it has also had many years of well-subsidized development post-launch. No publisher in its right mind would commit the resources necessary to beat it at that game. It’s just way too risky.
Steve’s discussion can be seen on page two and talks about his views of the genre.
The whole discussion is a very interesting read and provides some insight on how the genre has evolved.
Enjoy
MythosGuru has interviewed Programmer/Quest Designer/Etc., Marsh Lefler, much like the previous interview with Jason Beck.
Next week — whenever next week occurs (could be three weeks from now!) — either Particle Programmer, etc. John Dunbar or Environment Artist Kevin Green is on the bubble.
Be sure you check it out, the Devs are somewhat interesting people. 
If you missed the interview with Grimby from a few weeks ago, you can find it here.
Enjoy!
(Originally posted by Sulfuric)
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