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Interview: Bill Roper talks about leaving Blizzard and starting up a new company.
Date: July 25, 2003
Source: Planet Diablo

PlanetDiablo Interview

PlanetDiablo: What were your favorite moments working for Blizzard Entertainment?

Bill Roper: The time spent creating and talking about the games. It is unusual to have the opportunity to work in an industry where you truly get to do something you love, so I look at all the years working on such great titles like Warcraft, StarCraft and especially Diablo as special. The hours can be long and stress-filled, but coming out with a game that is enjoyed by millions of people makes all the effort worthwhile.

Perhaps the best thing about my time at Blizzard was being able to meet and spend time with the people who played our games. Hearing their stories and sharing their passion about gaming, as well as being a part of a thriving and active community, was humbling and awesome. I had the rare opportunity to travel around the world and meet gamers from the U.S., Europe and Asia, and it was simply fantastic. It is this connectivity with the gaming community that all of us intend to make a priority going forward with our new company, as well.

PlanetDiablo: How much control on the direction of Blizzard's games did you really have?

Bill Roper: A lot on some, a little on others, but Blizzard was never founded on the principal of a single voice making all the decisions. Blizzard is a company based on teamwork, and I think you can see how successful that model has been. This is another basic tenet on which will be building the foundation of our new company. You need talented and passionate people at all levels to create the best games possible. In short, great teams with great vision make great games.

PlanetDiablo: PR screening is obviously limiting, for good reasons. But, you are no longer under PR policies, and have no NDA contract. Given this fact, could you give us your honest view of Blizzard as it is now and where it came from?

Bill Roper: As a point of fact, I am still bound under a non-disclosure agreement, but that doesn’t preclude me from giving my honest opinion on Blizzard as a development company. Blizzard has an amazing array of talented people who are excited and driven to make the best games they can. This is the culture in which I was raised as a developer, and that baseline dedication has never changed.

PlanetDiablo: What are the tradeoffs involved in working for a subsidiary of Vivendi Universal Entertainment, or any substantial conglomerate?

Bill Roper: I think the biggest tradeoff you make is self-determination for security. Blizzard works very hard to maintain its unique culture so they can keep making the kind of games they do. This is always risky when you are a small company, especially when a big part of your development process relies on being able to take the time to properly polish your product. Over the years, we were acquired and then sold or merged multiple times, with each transaction making us part of a larger entity. The upside is that the bottom-line risk involved with long production schedules was lower and lower in relationship to the amount of pure cash our parent company had. The downside was that even if we shipped a game that did exceptionally well, it was (at times) barely a blip on their corporate radar.

An excellent example of this is what happened soon after we shipped StarCraft in April of 1998. The game was doing staggeringly well, we hit a million copies sold through in record time, and all was well in our world. Then, our parent company was rocked by uncovered fraud. By the end of September 1998, it was revealed that Cendant’s actual results for the year 1997 went from a net income of $55.4 million to a net loss of $217.2 million. The end result was that while having a huge conglomerate parent gave us the latitude to take as long as needed to get StarCraft right, it also meant that people we had never met and had no connection to literally put our futures – as well as the stock options that were there to reward us for our hard work – underwater.

While gaining the opportunity to have long development schedules and well-funded projects, we had lost the ability to being able to directly affect, or in some ways protect, our futures. Fortunately, Blizzard always survived, and I expect they will continue to do so, even through the current uncertainties concerning the transition of the Vivendi Universal Games unit.

PlanetDiablo: Tell us one thing about Blizzard Entertainment that only someone on the inside knows.

Bill Roper: Dave Brevik dreamed some of the best ideas for Diablo II up while he was in the shower. We used to joke that Dave needed a waterproof tape recorder so he could get down all the thoughts he had while scrubbing up in the morning before work. One example was when he came into the office and said, “I had this idea in the shower this morning. We should better define the classes through something I am calling Skill Trees so that players can really choose how to grow their characters.” It took about ten seconds for the team to realize that this was a pretty cool idea, and even though it put another 2 – 3 months into the development schedule, it was worth it.

PlanetDiablo: What made Blizzard North unique among the other great teams at Blizzard?

Bill Roper: Blizzard North was originally an outside developer named Condor that Blizzard acquired in 1996. That meant that a distinct company culture and workspace was already in place, and thankfully, changing that was not a part of the acquisition process. The guys in Irvine knew how precious their own culture was, so they made sure that the newly named Blizzard North was able to keep theirs intact as well. This meant that things got done differently up north than down south, to the betterment of the Diablo series.

Perhaps the most unique thing about Blizzard North was the fact that no matter how big Blizzard North got (up to about 65 people when we left) Dave, Erich and Max were still directly connected to the guys. Heck, they personally paid for bagels on Wednesdays and donuts on Fridays, just to show their appreciation for the hard work and dedication everyone put into the games.

PlanetDiablo: Do you think Blizzard will be able to replace such strong influences as the Schaefers, David Brevik, and of course yourself, now that you are gone?

Bill Roper: I think our departure will create some opportunities for people within the company to step up and take on high-level leadership roles. I know that whomever takes the reigns at Blizzard North will do their best. There are a lot of great people there, and I expect them to make the absolute best of things. Does this mean that we can be replaced? I wouldn’t say that as much as I would say that there is a window of opportunity open for the team there to create a new place and way for themselves.

PlanetDiablo: Could you give us any new details on the new company you are forming with the three others departed?

Bill Roper: We have a lot of things going on at once. I wish I could tell you our name and pass along a website address, but finding a cool name that isn’t already taken proves to be a Herculean task! We are currently doing trademark searches on different company names, working with an attorney to get our new venture incorporated, looking for office space, contacting financers and publishers, and trying to get back to all the people who have contacted us with an interest in working with us on our first game. Most importantly, we have already started the early design and programming phase of the project!

Past all the meetings and legal wrangling, we want to make games. To be honest, we aren’t really happy unless we are making games, so after we cleaned out our offices on Monday, we were sitting around in Dave’s living room on Tuesday throwing around ideas. Ideas that we, as well as anyone we have shared them with, are exceptionally excited about, by the way.

PlanetDiablo: Are there any games that you previously never got a chance to create that you hope to, now?

Bill Roper: Without giving anything away, yes. That being said, we also intend to use our experience and knowledge about how to make games to our best advantage. I think that when people see what we have in mind, they will be incredibly excited at what we are doing.

PlanetDiablo: What do you hope to do now with your new venture?

Bill Roper: Our goal is to make absolutely the best games possible. Now, I know that this is the goal of every new developer that comes along, but this is the culture we just left, and it’s the only way we know how to make games. We want to focus on one project at a time, so we’re looking to form a single team with a specific goal.

Eventually we intend to grow enough to be developing a major release and a secondary project (something like expansions or updates to the current project) but we don’t see getting much bigger than that. Being part of a huge company is exciting, but we just left that atmosphere, and we really want to get back to a tight family setting where we don’t spend time managing projects, but instead spend time making games.

PlanetDiablo: What improvements, changes, and innovations are you seeking to make with your new role in the gaming industry?

Bill Roper: The goal we have set for ourselves is to create another great world (the business folks like to call it a franchise) like Diablo. This isn’t saying that we are going to make the Diablo game again. What we are saying is that we want to have a full, rich, intensely fun world in which we set great games. Diablo was much more than a game as the great books from Simon and Schuster and the Dark Horse comics gave us a glance into. With our new project, we want to build a fiction and characters that will engage and compel players as well as making a game that will keep them coming back for more and more and more.

Beyond the creation of games, I personally hope that we can help people inside and outside of the industry to see that it is the people who make the games that are the real value in any company. We have all seen great franchises become less and less compelling as the people who first created and cared for those worlds left. Even though the franchise continued on, when you removed the people, its value faded because there was a strong connection there. The Terminator movies are great, but they also realized the importance of bringing Arnold back for the third film. Can you imagine a Harry Potter book that was not written by J.K. Rowling? Great franchises are best nurtured and grown by the people who create them, and this is true in the gaming industry as well.

PlanetDiablo: You have had a strong presence in the fan community of the Diablo series. As we look forward to your future projects, how do you plan to attract the interest and enthusiasm of Diablo fans?

Bill Roper: First and foremost, we hope that Diablo fans will be interested to see what we do next. We want to maintain our ties to the Diablo community because we are all passionate about a game and a world to which we all have deep ties. One of the last things I was working on before I left Blizzard was the 1.10 patch for Diablo II, and I don’t imagine I will ever stop playing the game.

We will be sure to keep the Diablo community aware of our plans, and we want to have a strong connection with them as we grow a new community of gamers around our next game. The players are the reason we make games, and they are all incredibly important to us, so expect to see us reaching out, maintaining our great relationships while forging new ones.

PlanetDiablo: What non-Blizzard, in-development games have you been watching with the most interest recently?

Bill Roper: I was really anticipating Star Wars Galaxies, but now haven’t had time to play! Going forward, there are a more than a few games across a lot of different genres that have my interest. To name a few off the top of my head, Prince of Persia, Lineage 2, Half Life 2, Doom III, Battlefield Vietnam, [The] Sims 2 and (perhaps unbelievably) Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup. I just want to see some wizard saying, “If it’s in the game, it’s in the game”.

PlanetDiablo: How do you see the gaming industry and its capabilities advancing now that the MMORPG genre is well-established and hardware keeps inching towards real-time cinematic-quality game play visuals?

Bill Roper: We are less and less limited by technology in what we can make, meaning that a lot of crazy game ideas are going to start seeing the light of day. And by crazy, I mean blue-sky projects that immerse players into the game like never before.

Perhaps the biggest change we will se in the next few years is more dependence and use of our online connectivity to not just play games, but also to buy new games, get new content and connect players in ways never before realized. Battle.net certainly was a pioneer in the field, but I expect to see the ease of use and simple connectivity that it offers becoming integrated into our gaming lives. I love multiplayer games and I think that we have only scratched the surface on what we can create and what we can expect in this area.

PlanetDiablo: As any loyal Diablo fan should know, you were the voice of the Lord of Terror himself in his games. If future additions to the series are made, can we expect a cameo?

Bill Roper: If Blizzard gave me a call to come in and lend my voice to any character with which I have become associated, I would do it in a heartbeat. I love the Diablo universe and the characters we created there, and it would be an honor to stay associated with it.