Flagship 'Barely Open,' Shutting Down Soon

Though Flagship Studios CEO Bill Roper previously stated that the Hellgate: London and Mythos developer was not shutting down despite having laid off most of its staff, ex-COO Max Schaefer has revealed that it is only open to take care of "final affairs."

"It's barely open," Schaefer explained to GameCyte. "It's just open enough to take care of the final affairs, but for all intents and purposes it's closed down."

"We don't exactly know the proper way to close down a company," added former Mythos executive producer Travis Baldree. "We're just trying to take care of the debts and the employees in an orderly fashion, so Bill [Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios] and one or two other people have stuck around and are doing their best to get that done."

Schaefer, Baldree and the rest of the Mythos development team has since reformed under a new company, Runic Games, which hopes to continue creating action-RPGs.

However, Badlree is fairly confident that Runic will not be able to resume development on the action-RPG Mythos, which is now in the hands of another company.

"We're proceeding under the assumption that we're not going to be able to get [Myhtos] or proceed on it," he explained. "Because of the nature of how the IP is being held, and the technology being held separately, it seems safer and better for us to proceed as if we're really not going to have any avenue to work with it."

The duo also revealed that Flagship's founders were "working pretty hard" to prevent closure.

"We were in very advanced negotiations with a couple of people for deals that would have kept Flagship open and would have kept everything running," stated Schaefer. "And in fact, for a good while it was looking like a near-certainty that one of those would have come to fruition."

"To the last minute and actually beyond the last minute, I know that negotiations were going on to try and make sure that we could get the studio back on track," added Baldree. "Primarily, we just all proceeded here like we were going to be releasing our open beta in October, and kept working until the last minute."