Bill Roper, David Brevik, and the Schaefer brothers Max and Erich are back. The key members of the creative teams behind Diablo and Diablo II, who left Blizzard Entertainment at the end of June, will announce their new game studio tomorrow.

　　The new studio, Flagship Studios, will be located in San Francisco. The Flagship team hopes to build on a track record established by their work on the Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo franchises. The Diablo series alone sold more than 13 million units worldwide.

　　In addition to Roper, Brevik, and Max and Erich Schaeffer, Flagship also counts Kenneth Williams among its founders. Co-founders David Glenn, Peter Hu, Philip Shenk, and Tyler Thompson bring the current staff count to nine. Each played important roles in the development of the Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo game franchises as well as the overall growth of Blizzard North, the studio where the Diablo series was created.

　　Brevik served as Blizzard North's President while Roper and the Schaefers held Vice President positions. Williams was Director of Business and Operations. Glenn and Shenk served as art leads on the Diablo games, with Glenn focusing on background artwork and Shenk leading the character artists. Hu and Thompson were senior programmers and held lead positions on Diablo II and the Diablo II: Lord of Destruction expansion set.

　　The question is, can Flagship duplicate their success at Blizzard North on their own? What are their immediate plans and long-term goals? And what were those first days free of the corporate reigns like for the original team of four?

　　GameSpot recently spoke with Bill Roper about Flagship's future. We caught up with Roper first at the company's temporary digs in San Francisco (where he let us walk away with a piece of concept art, see above) and then invited him to tape a video interview at the GameSpot Live studios. A link to the video interview is below.

　　GameSpot: Assuming that you can't speak to the full nature of the current game-in-development, can you give us some idea of scope, style, and flavor of title?

　　Bill Roper: Without giving away too much, I can say that we are making a game that fans of our previous games will really enjoy, but it won’t be what anyone expects. In terms of scope, we intend to create a game with a solid single player component, [and] great online multi-player support that receives more support and specific attention than anything we’ve done before. The flavor is a dark one (of course) that we think will really strike a chord with gamers around the world. The style--well, that gives a little too much away, I think…

　　GS: Bill, Bill…

　　BR: Well, I can leak a couple of things the game isn’t, though, just to get you thinking. It isn’t a classic fantasy story, it isn’t set in some place you’ve never heard of, and it isn’t a sports title. I know that this pretty much shoots down Bilbo’s Backyard Baseball, but I don’t want to get people’s hopes up too high for something we aren’t working on.

　　GS: What have you been doing differently at the new company that relates to what you learned while being a part of the Blizzard organization?

　　BR: I think we all saw a lot of changes in Blizzard, some for the better and some that threatened to pull us away from the core focus of making great games. We experienced growing pains, moving from a small company to a pretty big development studio with five projects, internal QA and customer support groups, our own marketing and PR teams, cinematics, sound and music departments spread out over two distinct location in Irvine and San Mateo. With Flagship, we want to get back to that core development setting again, where everyone is focused on a single game. Basically, it all comes down to spending less time managing teams and more time making games.

　　GS: Has the notoriety of the team hindered your progress in any way as you start out fresh?

　　BR: I actually think it has been a huge benefit. We were very fortunate to have publishers contacting us about how we could possibly work together, and they had a high level of insight into the work we had previously done while at Blizzard. As with any relationship in the entertainment industries, who you know is vitally important. Happily, we knew a lot of people already and the ones we didn’t knew who we were.

　　GS: Assuming that a like-quality product is the aim of the team, how are you planning on dealing with the inevitably high expectations (of gamers and publishers) that will be applied to the new group? What's this group’s feeling on announcing ship dates? On delays?

　　BR: We have a pretty strong track record to live up to, and we are using that as a personal incentive. We want the game we’re working on right now to be as high in quality, polish and playability as anything we’ve done in the past. We expect that of ourselves and we believe that gamers who have played our past efforts expect that of us as well. Those same gamers know that we have a reputation for taking as long as necessary to ship the best game we can. We want to remain true to that dedication to product quality with Flagship, and if that means moving the ship date out, we want everyone (including our publishers) to be on board with the concept. In terms of how this affects the setting of release dates, we always look first at release “windows”, such as summer of a certain year, and only set an actual street date when we are confident we can hit that.

　　GS: When did the conversations start with potential publishers?

　　BR: We’ve been talking with people since, literally, day two. You know, everybody called us, and we started calling people back. And, you know, we’ve gone through a lot of discussions...

　　GS: We thought it was amusing that one of the first bits of hard information that surfaced immediately upon your departure was your cell number popping up in various news stories. How did that happen?

　　BR: You know, we hadn’t sat down and calculated out for months that we were going to be leaving Blizzard. It kind of just happened, so we didn’t have anything set for, oh, now, here’s how people can get a hold of us. Leaving was amazingly chaotic. Suddenly we had no access to our files that we were all used to every day, and no email, and, you know, that kind of stuff. And so we threw the number out there, and it was great because a lot of people called us--immediately. As we’re loading up boxes and packing up our offices of ten years, and getting the eight of us to lift Dave’s big stupid desk in the back of the U-Haul truck, you know, that kind of stuff, the phone’s ringing and we’re talking to people.

　　GS: So what are the goals of the new company? What is most important to the team?

　　BR: The single biggest goal of the company is to make a great game. That was always our focus when we worked at Blizzard and it served us exceptionally well. You get past a lot of issues when you keep the game in the forefront of your discussions and thoughts. It’s the thing that allows us to have heated, passionate discussions about game mechanics, balance, technology, look, feel--everything, really--and still walk away friends. No one takes it personally because it’s all about making the game better. Another part of this is ensuring that everyone in the company has a voice. We encourage input on anything from everyone. While you have to ensure that the right people reserve the right to make the final call, it honestly does help the process to have a lot of people looking at and playing the game, and then getting their ideas into the mix. One thing that I think is refreshing for the publishers we have talked to is that we include them in that philosophy. They see a lot of games in various stages of development and their thoughts on our game are important to us.

　　GS: What are your goals for game one?

　　BR: We want to demonstrate that this team can still build a big hit. Our business plan is pretty conservative on numbers. We’re not anticipating and we don’t have to sell the kind of numbers we have in the past, so we’re looking at a subset of that success. But if we could make what’s considered a big hit or a triple A game, that’s our goal. Because then, after that, the sky is the limit. Who knows, maybe we make a super mega hit like we had in the past. But it doesn’t have to be. Sure, it’d be fun, but...

　　GS: Do you feel a need to distance yourselves from your Blizzard past in any way? If so, how?

　　BR: Yes and no, actually. We want people to understand that while we are extremely proud of all our accomplishments at Blizzard, we are starting something new and exciting. We want to learn from our past and build upon what we did in many ways, but at the same time we don’t view this as a crutch. We are fortunate in that many gamers know our previous work and are going to be looking at us with a keen eye, so while we have a fantastic heritage, we are also fully aware that we have to live up to the expectations that come along with that. The one way I hope we never are distanced from at Blizzard is the people who still work there. Leaving them was tough and we all have a lot of friends who we don’t get to see everyday anymore.

　　GS: What sort of people might the new studio be looking for in the future? How would interested parties get in touch with you?

　　BR: While it is still a little early for us to start hiring, we do know what we want in a teammate. First and foremost is a passion for games. We’ve always believed that you can’t make great games unless you play games--probably incessantly. Everyone at Flagship is a gamer and we play just about everything, good and bad, and have a great time working in an industry that is stressful and demanding while being rewarding and just plain fun a lot of the time. We want to work with people who understand that there is a lot expected of us from ourselves and the gaming community and is eager to step up to the plate and swing for the fences. We’ve unveiled our new company website at www.flagshipstudios.com and anyone who is interested in joining us on our quest to make some great games should check out the Job FAQ.

　　GS: Thanks and good luck with Flagship.