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Interview: Bill Roper speaks about leaving Blizzard, founding Flagship, plans for growing the company, gaming genres, and more.
Date: January 25, 2004
Source: GamingEye.com

Gamingeye Interview

Gamingeye: Please introduce yourself and tell us something about what you do at Flagship Studios.

Bill Roper: My name is Bill Roper and my official title at Flagship Studios is CEO. As for what I do, anything and everything I can to make (and help the team make) the best game possible. I also get to talk with a lot of press and gamers around the world, which is one of the really fun parts of my job.

Gamingeye: What kind of car do you drive?

Bill Roper: My everyday commute car is a 1998 Toyota RAV 4. We also own a couple of classic cars that have been in my wife’s family for years. I have never been a real car fanatic, although I do appreciate the craftsmanship and sheer fun of driving a high-performance vehicle. If I could, I would love to own a London taxi cab because they are fun, functional, and certainly unique in California.

Gamingeye: Tell us about the journey from leaving the already established Blizzard to co-found your own company?

Bill Roper: Actually, we didn’t plan on leaving Blizzard, but that’s the way things ended up working out. Basically, we were looking for a higher level of involvement concerning the sale of the Vivendi Universal Games unit and felt we had to go as far as tendering our resignations to try and open a direct line of communication with the decision makers in France. In the end, they decided to not afford us that opportunity and chose instead to accept our resignations.

Although leaving Blizzard was not our real intent or desire, we made the absolute best of the situation and formed a new development studio. We have made a very conscious decision to look forward in all of this as opposed to looking back, so our goals and focus is very much on the future. There are nine of us here now, and we all worked together at Blizzard North for many years. One of the great things about the core team we have put together is the fact that we know how to make a game together and that we are really more like a family than a company.

Gamingeye: How did you come up with the name Flagship Studio?

Bill Roper: When we started speaking with publishers about the game we wanted to make, they kept referred to it as a “real flagship title.” That’s definitely the level of quality and effort we wanted to pour into the design, so the phrase just started to stick out in our minds. It seemed like such a great goal to set for ourselves that we chose to use it as our company name, as well. It reminds us that we have a lot of personal and external expectations to live up to, and it also lets people unfamiliar with our company know that we have a lot of experience as developers.

Also, it has some bizarre “scourge of the high-seas” connotations for us, but that may be due to the fact that a lot of us had just seen Pirates of the Caribbean around the time we chose the name.

Gamingeye: How many people are currently employed by Flagship, what is the ideal size of the team?

Bill Roper: We have nine founding team members right now, and you can point your Internet browser of choice to http://www.flagshipstudios.com and click on the WHO WE ARE button to meet the guys. Actually, we felt extremely lucky to have the people we brought aboard come to us. We had a great relationship with a lot of the guys we worked with at Blizzard, and many of them contacted us, wondering what we were going to do. Since we’re focusing on a single game, and it’s still early in the development process, we’re starting with a very solid core group of designers, programmers and artists. We feel fortunate to have the nine people that we do as the foundation for the company, as developers and as people.

As far as a total company size, we are setting a goal of starting out by building a solid team to create a single project, so somewhere in the range of 30-35 team members.

Gamingeye: What type of genre is Flagship most interested in developing games for?

Bill Roper: We like to make games we would want to play, and for better or for worse, you name it and we probably play it. We play everything from Collectible Card Games to Role Playing Games to Real Time Strategy to First Person Shooters to MMORPGs to AD&D. We play all sorts of board games, Magic and even the occasional hand of poker. We love games, plain and simple, so when we sat down to choose what type of game to make, we had a lot on our minds.

While we aren’t divulging a lot about our game quite yet, the concept is quite different than what we’ve done in the past in many ways. There are specific philosophies of game design that we would incorporate into game we did, and I also think that fans of our past games will see that and appreciate it. Gamers can expect an exciting, compelling, addictive experience with a strong multiplayer component and a lot of content to keep them coming back for more and more and more!

Gamingeye: I read somewhere that your first game will offer quite a bit of multiplayer support, ever considered an MMORPG-title?

Bill Roper: We all have played – or still play – MMORPGs, and I think every company talks about what they would do if they made one. Building a gigantic, ongoing, persistent and organic world is what a lot of us got into this business to try and do, no matter what genre we are in, so I think this is one of the creative reasons we are seeing so many of these games being made.

Gamingeye: There has been very little, if any information about your upcoming game, when will you start talk about it?

Bill Roper: When looking at when to start really talking a lot about your game publicly, we think it’s a good idea to be fairly far along in the development process. Part of that is having a good idea on how far you’ve come in the process, and when you are going to be done. It can be frustrating to the publisher, the development team and the gaming community to be talking about a game for so long, it seems like it’s never going to come out. At the same time, you want to be able to get enough information out so that gamers know what to expect and, hopefully, can get excited about the game.

Right now, it is impossible to set a realistic date because we are still too early in the development process. This is mostly because our design philosophy is so organic and iterative. We do have an idea of how long we want to take to create the game, but we’re very wary about setting expectations with the gaming community on when that is. Gamers are a passionate, devoted lot and they have long memories for story details, features and release dates. Even when you’re just chatting about ideas, those tend to get written in stone somewhere. So although we have a reasonable idea of when we will have the game done, it’s still too early to say, and therefore, its still too early for us to start getting into any details on the game.

Gamingeye: Have you secured a publisher for you upcoming game?

Bill Roper: We have been spending the past six months meeting with an almost intimidating number of excellent publishers from all around the world, and we feel like we are in the final stages of getting signed on with a great partner. We were incredibly impressed with so many of the companies and people we spoke with, so it made the process exciting, but difficult for all the right reasons.

Gamingeye: I have to ask this, can you give us a hint of what you may be working on?

Bill Roper: Not really, just because we are so early in the development of the game. What I can say is that we’re going to make a game that is simple to learn, easy to play and has a huge amount of replayability. We don’t want to just do the same thing again, but anyone who has played the games we made while at Blizzard will be excited about the direction we’re heading.

Thanks for taking the time to answer all the questions, do you have any final words to the Swedish fans out there?

Bill Roper: I have had the pleasure of visiting Sweden on numerous occasions to talk about games, and I am eagerly awaiting the opportunity to do so again. I have greatly enjoyed my time spent with the people I have met from your community of gamers, and I’ll never pass up a chance to talk about games over an extremely cold vodka in the ice bar.