Former Mythic CEO Mark Jacobs, who developed Warhammer Online and Dark Age of Camelot, explained his reasoning behind leaving the company he had co-founded after publisher Electronic Arts merged with Bioware in 2009. Simply put, he felt there was no place for him in EA’s plans for Mythic.
”Let me be very clear about this,” Jacobs stated. ”John Riccitiello is the CEO and it’s his company. They bought Mythic. JR has the right to do whatever he wants. I will never look at him or say publicly ‘why would you do that, bla bla bla?’ That’s not my job.
“They made a decision on a direction they wanted to go and obviously, as we put out in our joint statement, that wasn’t a direction that had a role for me, or at least the role that I wanted. It really is as simple as that. Or at least publicly. Whatever went on behind the scenes, whatever we talked about, I have no intention of sharing that.”
Jacobs is adamant that the breakup was civilized, as each amicably made the departure as painless as possible, with only praise for one another.
It’s never wise to burn bridges when founding a new studio, which Jacobs has named City State Entertainment. It will explore the profitable mobile and social gaming space. Jacobs had interest in the mobile and social platforms even while at Mythic, “In my last conversation at EA with my former partner, I told him that I had been racking my brain for weeks on how we could get into a space that I thought was going to explode. I’d seen what Zynga was trying to do, and I could see where the industry was going. I’d spent that last weekend trying to figure out where we could go as EA with Mythic properties.
“Y’know, it’s funny. I came up with a really good plan, and then there was my departure. It’s ironic that two years later I’m able to do what I wanted to do then - which was to get into this (social gaming) space.”
City State will be releasing its debut title next year, which has not been revealed yet publicly.
