Bill Roper Interviews

Fresh off his promotion to chief creative officer of Cryptic Studios, long-time video game producer Bill Roper has taken the time to answer a variety of different questions about his time in the industry for both Ten Ton Hammer and Games Radar.

A snip from TTH’s interivew:

Ten Ton Hammer: Can you give us a brief biography of how you got involved with gaming, and eventually Cryptic, and how you got to the position you’re at now?

Bill Roper: I started at Blizzard Entertainment in 1994 on Warcraft: Orcs and Humans. I’ve done everything from total grunt work to world design over the last 15.75 years. I’ve produced, designed, written and performed voice-over, created manuals, done music and sound, and even run community boards! While at Blizzard I worked on the Warcraft, StarCraft, and Diablo franchises and also managed the project oversight Strike Teams.

In 2003 I left Blizzard to start my own company (Flagship Studios) with a group of guys from Blizzard North. With Flagship we created and shipped Hellgate: London while also launching a second company (Ping0) to provide all of the back-end infrastructure for an online game. We closed the studio in 2008 and in November of that year I started at Cryptic Studios as Design Director and Executive Producer on Champions Online.

And a little something from GR’s interview:

How was the Hellgate experience for you personally?

The thing that really disappointed and saddened me was that it went beyond the (Hey, you guys made a game and I thought it was crap) posts to personal attacks on people. This bizarre thought process somehow suggested that we did things specifically to screw our players. As if we were all sat around plotting what we could do next that would really make them angry. No developer thinks that!

It was really exciting though, don’t get me wrong. Certainly that was the first major entrepreneurial step that I’d taken, in terms of being there from day one, creating something from the ground up, both from the game standpoint and in terms of the company. I’d never trade that experience. Even with the fact that we ended up failing so spectacularly.