INTERVIEW: Travis Baldree - Runic Games

Travis Baldree is one of the founders of the new development house Runic Games Inc., a company formed after the closure of Flagship Studios in Seattle.

Talking exclusively to IncGamers, Baldree tells us how far Mythos was away from being released, more details about the game and when we can expect to hear announcements from the newly found Runic Games Inc.

Coming from a strong gaming background, Travis has worked on a number of successful products in any number of roles ranging from project leader, to art director.

What happened with Mythos? The IP was sold and you guys have moved on?

At present the Mythos IP is held in such a way that we have no access to it. It seems the best move for our team to dive straight into developing a new product, and put to use all that we've learned from the development of Mythos. This has an added advantage for us in that the Mythos IP really grew a little oddly over the course of development, given its inception as a network test. Starting anew gives us an opportunity to do the story and setting elements right, and with input from the whole team right at the outset.


Do you know if a new team is going to continue development of Mythos, and release it? There have been hints of development being taken over by a new team in San Francisco under T3 Entertainment following recent job postings.

At present I just don't know if that's going to happen. I will say that picking up work after the fact and taking it to completion is an extremely difficult task - there is a lot of shared knowledge in a game development team that exists there organically, and it's hard to go through rediscovery on a project of this complexity with a new crew. I don't have any real inside information, however.


How close to release do you think Mythos was? How successful do you think it could have been in today's market?

We were scheduled to go into Open Beta in October, with commercialisation 2 months after that - we were very, very close. We all believed in what we were doing with Mythos, and think it could have been pretty successful, especially with ongoing development.


It must have been painful to see a project through so much development, well into beta testing, and then not be able to see it to fruition. How has this affected the development team?

It is definitely a hard thing - it's brutal to come so close and lose all of your blood, sweat and tears when you're approaching release. We have a great group though, and have collectively chosen to see this as an opportunity to start fresh with lessons learned, and a team fully built and ready to go. There are a lot of advantages to doing so, and I think we can put something together that we can be proud of.