Mythic’s Mark Jacobs talks about the path to getting the Warhammer IP (Part 1)
By Michael Lafferty

“Why did we want it? We all saw the potential.”

There are those people who, when faced with a torrent of doubts from naysayers, decide to put it all on the line and forge ahead. Count Mark Jacobs in that group. When Mythic Entertainment developed Dark Age of Camelot, there were many publishers who said the title would not fly, that massively multiplayer online games were not all that successful and that one based on the hybrid worlds of medieval Camelot fantasy would not work. Jacobs didn’t believe that. Instead he believed in the intellectual property, the game design and the creative talent of the small group of designers that had attached themselves to the Mythic star.

Long story short – Mythic published the game itself, and now the title is on the verge of celebrating its fifth anniversary. It has developed a community of players from around the world and continues as one of the elder statesmen in the MMO world.

But Mythic was not content to merely rest on the DAoC laurels. There was an IP out there that had Jacobs’s attention. Another development studio had a chance at it, but that ended up being cancelled. When the opportunity appeared, Jacobs and Mythic were ready.

Welcome to Warhammer Online, Mythic’s pending MMO slated to be released in 2007. During a recent trip to the Virginia studios where Warhammer was the star, Jacobs (the president and CEO of Mythic) took time to chat about both Mythic and the pending title.

“We actually were making MUDs (Multiple User Dungeon, usually text-driven games that were the precursor to the modern MMO) and MMOs before anyone was even thinking what an MMO is,” Jacobs said, in talking about the long history of the Mythic team.

When it came to the history of the modern MMO, DAoC was actually the fourth big release (behind Meridian 59, Ultima Online and EverQuest). 

“We tried to get funding before Ultima went live, we tried to get funding before EverQuest went live; nobody wanted to invest,” Jacobs said.

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?

Jacobs: “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.”

Q: So you took the IP, you saw what Climax had been trying to do with it – you just took everything they had been trying to do, threw it out the window and started from scratch?

Jacobs: “Yes. The extent that we looked at their stuff was as follows: We looked at their art. Games Workshop owned everything – the art, the design documents, the code. So it was a JV (Joint Venture) where Climax was putting up the sweat equity and Games Workshop was putting up the IP and the cash. So GW owned everything. So they asked ‘look at this and see if there is anything you want to use.’ So we looked and we looked through all the art, and we said we didn’t want to use any of it, there was nothing that fit where we wanted to go with the game. In terms of the code, I didn’t even want to look at the code – so nobody at Mythic ever saw it. We said ‘keep it away from us, we want nothing to do with it.’ Not because it might not have been good, but I don’t even want to go down that path. With the art, it was 100% clear that it was all GW.

“And their game (Climax’s vision), from the get-go, was a very different game than ours. It was a game much more like an incredibly dark EverQuest than it was like a Camelot. So I didn’t think there was anything to gain from looking at the Climax design docs.”

Q: There are going to be some people that are going to be unaware of what you are doing with Warhammer that may say that this is going to be Camelot 2 …

Jacobs: “Oh, they are already saying that. They said it from the day we announced it. ‘Oh, it’s just Camelot with new skins!’ Well, guess what, it’s not. First, people have to ask themselves, would GW allow that to happen? GW has the license, they have approval on everything we do. A user, player doesn’t want to believe me, and I can understand that. I mean I’m the president of a software company and people never want to believe the president of a software company. Then you have to look at GW and go, do you believe them? If people believe they want to make a great game why would they want us to remake Camelot in a Warhammer atmosphere?

“The second point, if we were going to do Camelot with Warhammer skins, why don’t we just do Camelot 2? It’s cheaper, I won’t have to pay for the license, I won’t have to pay royalties. Camelot 2 – done; we already have the IP, we have the design, we have races, we have classes, we have settings, it’s all done for us. So logically, it makes no sense … now that is not going to stop the conspiracy guys from ‘oh yeah, it doesn’t matter.’ We could put out screenshots, and they are still going to say ‘it’s just Camelot 2.’ I saw some guy online, and I won’t mention his name because I don’t want to give him credit for being a foil-hat guy, and he said ‘this means it is Camelot 2’ and he pulled out one thing from the description and said ‘see, it’s Camelot 2.’ To the credit of the people on the boards, they said (mimics reading text on the forums) ‘not Camelot … not Camelot … not Camelot … Ok, well, yes, it is an RvR (realm versus realm) game with multiple realms in a fantasy setting’ – that’s what he pulled out.”

In part two of the interview with Jacobs, he continues his talk about the Warhammer world, as well as some of the parallels to current MMOs.

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