Flagship Co-Founder Bill Roper Talks Failure And Lessons Learned

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Posted May 18, 2009 - By Jake Gaskill

Hellgate: London For all you wanna-be-future-developers and/or gaming executives out there, the best thing you can do at this point in preparation is familiarize yourself as much as you can with failure.

And one of the best ways to do that is read interviews in which developers of massively popular and success game franchises talk about the failures they've encountered during their careers, what caused them, how they overcame them and what they learned as a result.

Turns out Gamasutra has a great article that very much speaks to this idea. It's an interview with Flagship co-founder, and ex-Blizzard bigwig, Bill Roper in which he goes into tremendous detail about the trials, tribulations, sacrifices and lessons learned during the turbulent times that led up to Flagship's closing and the role that the company's action-RPG Hellgate: London played in the whole mess.

There's a lot of good stuff here, but here are a few of the choice thoughts:

"I think the biggest [lesson] that I learned, and it's very cliche, is that it's just a business. I was very personally, more emotionally invested in the company...Whether that's a design decision, something about a business model, or just like an academic discussion, I can say I have both sides of that coin now. I can say, 'These are the things that were amazingly successful at Blizzard and how they worked. And these were the things that were amazingly unsuccessful at Flagship...And so, I think I learned as much from the failure, if not more, than the successes."

It's a fairly lengthy interview, but its also a pretty damn interesting and telling one as well. And for anyone serious about making a go in the gaming industry (or any industry for that matter), I recommend giving it a read.

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Tags: PC Gaming