Warhammer Online Q&A, Part One

GameZone is offering up the first portion of a new interview with Mythic Entertainment’s Mark Jacobs about the company’s decision to pursue a Warhammer MMORPG. Check it out:

Q: When you have a company with a great track record, and great longevity in the genre, with the suspension of Imperator, what was it about Warhammer that made it an attractive property for the MMO treatment?

A: (Keep in mind that I’ve known the guys at GW (Games Workshop, the license holders) for years. I knew them prior to us getting the license. Paul Barnett (the design manager) and I go back to the MUD days, on AOL and before. He was doing his MUDs in Europe and I was doing mine here. So I was very familiar with the license and some of the guys at Games Workshop three years, maybe, before I signed the deal . I can’t remember if it was three or four years. So we’ve always been very aware of the IP, not only because a lot of us played it but because of their work through Climax (which tried to make an MMO of the Warhammer license and halted production shortly after E3 2004). Why did we want it? We all saw the potential.

(All you have to do is look at the fantasy role-playing books, the fantasy battle books, they published a book called World of Warhammer long before World of Warcraft came out. So we’ve always known there is a hell of a lot of potential there. But we were never able to hook up. I mean you look at where we are now. When we did Camelot . at the time we spoke to them about doing an MMO, based on Warhammer, they already had a deal, and we had no money. All the money that we had, we sold part of the company to do the funding to do Camelot. No publisher wanted to give us any money to do Camelot, so we sold a piece of the company to afford to do the game. And so the timing for the first time in years had been right. They were coming off, what was obviously, a failed there is no other way to say venture with Climax. They needed a little time to digest all the information and see what went right and what went wrong. And there we were saying, ‘˜hey, when you are ready to talk again .’ So they took some time, and then we started negotiations. And eight months later, we had the license.)