Bill Roper played a leading part in every big Blizzard franchise prior to World of WarCraft. In 2003, he founded Flagship Studios. Their first product is supposed to ship in summer 2007 -- and to beat Diablo 2 in every single aspect. GamersGlobal talked to Bill about Hellgate: London, Blizzard, Vivendi and the PC as the gaming platform of the future.

GG: Bill, you’ve started working in the industry and for Blizzard in 1994 as the composer for Blackthorne.

Bill Roper: Yes, on the PC side.

GG: I remember reviewing Blackthorne for PC Player. Nobody knew about Blizzard, then. Since then, you’ve been working, mostly as the producer, on the WarCraft, StarCraft and Diablo franchises. That’s quite a career!

Bill Roper: It’s been good so far, I’ve been having a good time.

GG: So why on earth did you decide to leave Blizzard in 2003?

Bill Roper: We weren’t really looking to leave, to be honest, we were more interested in trying to find a way to work within the structure at Blizzard. There was a lot going on at that time, rumours about the sale of Blizzard. It was totally unclear what was going to occur, we were getting mixed signals. Our guys would come to us and say: “We’ve heard that we are gonna bought by Microsoft”. Or “we will be sold on the stock market”. We basically approached Vivendi and said: We need to know what’s going on! The problem was that we were getting nothing back, so finally, in an effort to show how serious we were about this, we send in letters of resignation: “We will resign if you do not include us in that process!”. And all we wanted to was to be able talk to someone in France! But they decided not to tell us.

GG: 'We' would be Blizzard North at that time?

Bill Roper: It happened to everyone, but those of us who sent word were Dave Brevik, Erich and Max Schaefer and myself, bascially the management of Blizzard North at that time.

GG: What was the answer of Vivendi?

Bill Roper: We never got one directly from Vivendi, that was part of the problem. So even with the resignations, the answer came back through the usual channels. So we heard from Mike Morheim down south that he had been told by the guys from New York who had been told by the guys in France...

GG: That really gives you the impression that you’re important for the company.

Bill Roper: That’s always the challenge for a multi-national company. At that time, Vivendi Universal Games was not doing anywhere near as well as it is now. They didn’t know about their own future four years ago. things today are obviously very different, they had a lot of personnel changes there. But at that time the owners of the companies didn’t really know what to do with them, and that was extremely difficult for teams like us that wanted to focus on producing good games. It ended like this: they kept the resignations, we left, and the next day, we started Flagship.