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Bill Roper Interview

The Bill Roper Interview on 1Up is a Q&A with the cofounder of Flagship Studios about the developer that is in essence deceased at this point, as well as thoughts on Diablo III and other topics later on. As to the subject of Flagship, they ask about what he can discuss (at one point he makes a pointed reference to Hanbitsoft not honoring their nondisclosure agreements), and he describes efforts at paying off institutions and employees still owed money by Flagship and the attempts to save the company from going under. His comment about losing the Mythos IP, indicates he thinks the new owners got less than they bargained for:

Yeah. But I think part of it is -- the challenge they face is -- it's like if somebody says, "Hey, I made you a loan against your Ferrari, [and] now the loan's due, so I want the Ferrari." And I say, "Great, here's a box of parts, because I didn't actually finish building the car yet." So 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. So yes, you have it, but you have it where it is, which isn't done yet. It's a lot different from a movie. With a film you can say, "Here's all the footage. Get some competent guys with an Avid system, and you could piece something together. Go shoot some more scenes. Release the film." Totally different situation here. There isn't just a quick way you can slap something together. So I think that they're facing a big challenge: How to actually get a shippable title out of this without that team being there anymore. Unfortunately, it isn't something we didn't kind of warn them about. We said, "We want to know what you guys will do." We had transition service agreements that we have done everything we can to fulfill. Flagship at this point is unable to actually provide those transition services. I don't have programmers anymore, or artists to work on the title, but we provided them with all the personal contact information with anyone they wanted. After that the onus is on them as far as whether or not to bring those people in.

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53. Re: Also, Bill Aug 20, 2008, 04:14 Flatline
 
You're really really really really REALLY fucking bad at "doing business."

I've known Bill Roper personally (I wouldn't say we're friends, but I've spoken with him a number of times), and you're right. Think more "charismatic figurehead" than "business acumen magnate". He should have hired someone to run the company and make those decisions while he focused on the things he did best. Maybe he did and he still crashed and burned. It seemed like Diablo meets Quake would be a freakin' no-brainer right?

I would recommend that when you inevitably start up another game, because apparently there are always investors more than willing to fork over cash to retards like you, you have someone with a little more business smarts handle the business side.

Ah you already recommended someone else run the company. Should have kept reading!

He has an impressive resume. Nobody looks at the details in the corporate world it seems. They see Blizzard, Diablo, and Warcraft, and get an instant hardon and the checkbook comes out. Best job I ever had, the company went out of business. Why? Because the guy they hired, after seeing that he was a high up at Verizon I believe it was, ran the massive project they gave him into the ground and bankrupted a 20 year company in 18 months. Nobody knew or cared previously that he lost the phone company 33 million dollars in a botched deal. It's common in the corporate world to hire people who are ass monkeys and recycle them over and over again, figuring that they are part of some elite brotherhood that normal people couldn't possibly be part of. Hell, I can screw up multi-million dollar business for one tenth of what they pay some of these people and everyone will be "happy".

your readers might have wanted to hear a bit more about what Bill Roper was going to do for the fucking GAMERS that bought his ridiculous piece of shit.

Is it even in Roper's hands any more? I thought some korean company decided to pick up the pieces and try to make something fun out of it. I think Flagship is a studio without *any* IP any more.

Knowing the Koreans, they'll turn it into a f*cking billion dollar game by doing something simple like making you pay one dollar real world every time you want to identify a loot drop. To give it mass appeal they'll put kittens on your armor or have 100,000 little ant-demon minions following you around to "do your bidding" though they actually contribute nothing to the game. Some of those Korean MMOs are gargantuan money pits, and the Koreans flock to them like crazy.

This comment was edited on Aug 20, 04:18.
 
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>> 53. Aug 20, 04:14  Re: Also, Bill Flatline
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