Bill Roper joins Cryptic Studios
Veteran game developer Bill Roper of Blizzard North and Flagship Studios fame has joined MMO developer Cryptic Studios to work as Design Director first and foremost on their upcoming super herp MMORPG Champions Online that will be released early next year on PC and Xbox 360.
I met Bill Roper the first time in Stockholm back when I was a rookie in this game... could it have been early 2003 or maybe late 2002? He was presenting a playable code on the illfated Starcraft: Ghost for a select audience at Nordic Sea Hotel close to the central station. Bill played it on Xbox and I recall a sequence where Nova was overlooking a battlefield, and later she would run through the chaos of battle. There was also a underground level on Char and several other cool things back when the game was primarily a stealth action title.
The next time I met Bill was four years later in San Francisco at the EA Partners' party during GDC, at the point he had been working on Hellgate: London for quite some time - in fact ever since he started Flagship Studios with his fellow former Blizzard colleagues back in late 2003. The game was release in October the same year, but the launch was plagued with problems and the game never took off as expected. Flagship Studios that were also developing Mythos had been betting the farm on success and in August 2008 the studio was finally dissolved.
We wish Bill all the best in the future...
(check out the old Hellgate: London interview with Bill Roper from GDC 2007 below - if nothing else for the fantastic view)
- System:PC, Xbox 360
- Genre:MMORPG
- Developer:Cryptic Studios
- Producer:Cryptic Studios
- Offline players:1
- Online players:1-100 000
- Age limit:From 16 years
- Release date:04 September 2009
Which one of these upcoming Q1 releases are you most excited about?
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