Hellgate: London Development Diary

Hellgate London Developer Diary 1: The beginning

Written by Bill Roper, CEO – Flagship Studios

Flagship Studios was born July, 2003, but it was more of a matter of circumstance than a grand scheme. We resigned from Blizzard Entertainment in an attempt to have more input into the rumoured / proposed sale of Vivendi Universal Games. Obviously we didn’t see eye-to-eye on this matter, but the end result was that those resignations were accepted and the very next day, we started Flagship Studios.

On that first day as a new company we saw the genesis of what would become Hellgate: London. The day after Erich Schaefer, Max Schaefer, David Brevik and I left Blizzard we met in David’s front room. We talked about the challenges and goals of starting a new company. We also started throwing around ideas for our first game and after awhile, Brevik proposed the high-level idea of a completely randomized RPG that was played from the first-person perspective. In the most basic shorthand – Diablo II meets Half Life 2. The idea wasn’t to make a First-Person Shooter, but to make a Role-Playing Game that drew from elements that make FPS games immersive and compelling. We then did what we usually do at this point in the design process – we spent 15-20 minutes trying to figure out why it was a bad idea. After due deliberation, we couldn’t find any reason NOT to go for it.

Next up was when and where to set the game. We didn’t want to do just another high fantasy world, and we’d done the ancient Gothic thing with Diablo. Max suggested we use London as a locale and the idea to blend fantasy and sci-fi by setting it in the near future was natural. London was a great idea for so many reasons. The city has a distinct look. Because it has been through so much turmoil over the centuries, London is the proverbial phoenix, literally rising out of the ashes. They’ve rebuilt the city numerous times, so there is Gothic architecture next to modern buildings next to Elizabethan and Victorian and Georgian styles. You get all these great looks and, since we wanted a modern city that had a foundation in mythology and magic, London fit perfectly.

It was also very important that London has an entire city beneath the city. The Underground stations to the plague pits that were dug in the 1660s to World War II bomb shelters to the brother and sister rivers to the Thames – and the list goes on and on. There are all these things that are really down there and perfectly met our desire to have the game take place equally above and below ground. London provided us a place where we could set a modern dungeon crawl!

The core concept of Hellgate: London has remained intact from that first day. We’ve built solidly upon the initial idea, fleshing out the design and then adding and iterating as we went along. Our development process is best described as organic since we’re constantly evaluating and modifying the game every single day. We do lock down the content and design at some point, but we’ve never written up a design document on day one and then made the game according to what’s there for the next 3-4 years. Constantly playing the game and giving ourselves as much flexibility as possible to incorporate feedback and ideas into the design gives us the best results, and we’ve tried to pass this along to all of our team members.

Those first few months were exciting and extremely challenging. The very early and basic game was progressing quickly, especially considering there were four of us at the time, but the work that was in front of us was daunting. The work we do is complex, time consuming and takes true dedication, so it was essential that everyone we hired had a passion for making games. We were incredibly fortunate to have the best members of our old Diablo team at Blizzard join us – especially since we spent the first year of development working out of Tyler Thompson’s (one of our Technical Directors) house! There were nine of us – Me, David Brevik, Erich Schaefer, Max Schaefer, Kenneth Williams, Tyler Thompson, Dave Glenn, Phil Shenk, and Peter Hu – that comprised that founding core of the team and the company. We quickly brought on very key people to both help create the game and grow the company, and they all deserve recognition and praise for their long-time contributions. When you get your copy of Hellgate: London, PLEASE take the time to watch our credits. Those people have put many years of their lives into making something they hope you will enjoy for years to come.