Bill Roper Details The Sinking Of Flagship

By Paul Munn | August 18, 2008

Flagship’s collapse has been shrouded in some mystery and it looks like my favorite Flagship product — ok they only had two — but anyway it looks like Mythos is in Hanbitsoft’s hands and might come back someday. Jeff Green has a rather sizable interview with Bill Roper at 1Up. Roper left Blizzard and is the founder of Flagship. He gives lots of detail on what’s happened to the studio.

At the outset you get the idea that Roper feels a strong sense of duty to the former Flagshippers:

We handpicked everybody, both on the game-content side and the online-technology side. So we’re really working to get those guys placed.

He hints that their attempt to get a new partner, investor, or owner fell in he middle of a big aquisition spree. He doesn’t mention EA by name, but he does mention that some large publishers were in the middle of acquiring or trying to acquire others and so, while interested in Flagship in some way, couldn’t give them the attention they needed right now. I guess it really is true that so much success is timing, and not all that timing is in your own hands. It’s also interesting to me that when T3 invested into Hanbitsoft Roper says they turned from a positive partner into an adversarial one.

Now it’s all about closing up shop as gracefully as possible. For the full details check out the interview here.