KickStarter BattleTech Pre-Release Thread

[Jedi Exile]

Well, hopefully with this amount of money they will be able to make a bigger and better game.

 

[Jimmious]

Ulminati should be forced to buy a copy full price after the dramatic failure of his predictions

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Late backer site
https://battletech.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders

 

[anus_pounder]

Current list of included mechs is basically everything Inner Sphere from MWO. Read: everything artwork and a 3d model exists for.


LIGHT: Locust, Commando, Spider, Firestarter, Jenner, Panther, Raven, Urbanmech

In looking at these, the Cataphract has a manufacture date of 3025 and the Raven is 3024, so I'd expect those chassis to be very rare depending on theater of operation.

Spoiler

 

[khavi]

Spoiler

 

[anus_pounder]

Is that urbanmech wearing a fez?

 

[PeachPlumage]

Do not underestimate Urbanmech!

 

[Rhapsody'n Blue]

*clap*clap*clap*

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

If anyone is interested in some sperging over IP rights and Jordan Weisman's (pretty amazing) career as a serial entrepreneur, I checked out a lot of old interviews and articles and summarised a few below. This was mostly because, in the run up to the BT kickstarter, I was wondering how it fitted in with MWO and the now defunct Mechwarrior Tactics. Also, this 2012 quote on Shadowrun Returns:

"Hoi right back at ya! A) We licensed SR from Smith and Tinker who has the licence from Microsoft, and are working with the Wizkids/Topps licensee Catalyst Games to make sure things are coordinated but that’s it in terms of working with previous companies on SRR."

The reason I found the statement interesting is that Smith and Tinker and Wizkids were both actually founded by Jordan Weisman.

Spoiler

FASA

1980 - FASA Corporation founded
- Battletech, Shadowrun, Star Trek tabletop games developed
1987 - Virtual World Entertainment: subsidiary to develop Battletech centres

details

http://www.binpress.com/blog/2015/0...n-weisman-mitch-gitelman-harebrained-schemes/
Jordan: FASA built up and then we started Virtual Entertainment, which launched the BattleTech centers, and then that company got acquired by the Disney Family, and together we built a chain of virtual world centers around the world, and that’s when Mitch joined us.

It was at Virtual World Entertainment, which was – actually, no, sorry. I’ll back up.

Mitch: You wanted me to work at Virtual World Entertainment.

Jordan: Yeah, I tried to hire you at Virtual World Entertainment, but you didn’t come at that point. Then we started a company called FASA Interactive and FASA Interactive then merged with Virtual World, and it was at that point you joined us.

1995 - FASA Interactive founded, to develop video games based on FASA IPs
1996 - FASA Interactive merged with Virtual World Entertainment
1999 - Microsoft purchased FASA Interactive, renamed FASA Studio within Microsoft, run by JW

details

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/microsoft-destroyed-development-culture-weisman
MechWarrior and Shadowrun developer never had a chance claims founder - and Microsoft almost did the same damage to Bungie
26/8/09

FASA Interactive founder Jordan Weisman has spoken out about Microsoft's acquisition of his highly-regarded studio, saying that the corporation "destroyed" its development culture and came close to doing the same with Halo developer Bungie.

"When Microsoft bought FASA Interactive and incorporated it into Microsoft... the two reasons they bought us was, one, they wanted the catalogue of intellectual properties and, two, they felt that we had developed a really good development culture. And the reality is that, pretty much from the day we moved to Redmond, that development culture was destroyed," Weisman told GamesIndustry.biz.

"I don't think the studio ever really had a chance. It was destroyed right in the beginning."

And Microsoft came close to repeating its mistakes with Bungie, added Weisman, who was working for the corporation as creative director at the time the Chicago-based studio was acquired.

"When we were acquiring Bungie, they wanted me to sit down with the owners of Bungie and tell them how well the transition went," he explained. "And it was like - 'what planet are you guys on?' This transition did not go well. And actually I became the lead vocal pain in the ass to get things done very different for Bungie.

"I tried to convince them to leave Bungie in Chicago, but not winning that I did succeed in getting them to put them in a walled off room, which didn't follow any of the other Microsoft stuff. We were much better able to defend Bungie's culture than we were FASA's culture."

Weisman established FASA Corporation (which later became FASA Interactive) in 1980, and the company was subsequently merged with Virtual World Entertainment then acquired by Microsoft in 1999.

In 2007, FASA became one of the first studios closed by Microsoft as part of a series of cutbacks.

The reasons for this are clear for Weisman, who had already left the company to start up new venture WizKids by the time Microsoft pulled down the shutters on FASA.

They moved everybody into Microsoft's standard organisation, he said, and then changed his role so his staff were no longer reporting to him. "I was creative director for the entire group - all 300 people, not just the 60 that came with me from Chicago - so that didn't help either."

2001 - FASA Corporation closes publishing business. Sells Battletech and Shadowrun IPs (excl the FASA Interactive video game rights which rest with MS) to Wizkids, a new company started by JW. FASA Corp remains as a holding company for some IP rights.

details

https://web.archive.org/web/2011052...strategy/mechcommander2/news.html?sid=2679199

FASA shuts down
By Trey Walker, GameSpotPosted Jan 26, 2001 7:59 pm PT

The company that created the Battletech and Crimson Skies tabletop games is closing its doors.

FASA Corporation has announced that it will close its doors at the end of April. FASA is the company that created Battletech, Shadowrun, Earthdawn, Crimson Skies, and several other role-playing and board games. According to the company statement, the closure is due to major changes in the adventure gaming world over the 20 years that FASA has been in business, and the founders of the company feel that it is time to pursue other interests. The company will remain open until April 30, 2001, in order to sell off its current inventory, and it may release additional products next month. It is selling the rights to the Battletech and Shadowrun properties to WizKids, a company started by FASA co-founder Jordan Weisman, the creator of Mage Knight Rebellion.

WIZKIDS

2002 - JW leaves Microsoft to join Wizkids

details

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/video-games/issues/issue_73/421-Number-of-the-Beast
28/11/06

Getting back to the reason he left Microsoft, Weisman tells me he left because "I'd started a company called WizKids. It was initially just designed to be kind of a relief from the bureaucracy of Microsoft, a little hobby because of this game idea I'd come up with. ... But that little hobby took off at this incredible rate, and was growing really fast, and I needed to leave Microsoft and run it full-time. ... And that company grew very quickly, and we sold that to Topps in 2003." Prior to the acquisition, he'd started up another company called 42 Entertainment, which dealt in ARGs and other forms of new marketing. "After the acquisition, I was able to devote more time to 42 as I was fulfilling my obligation to Topps, and left Topps earlier this year to be full-time with 42."

2003 - Wizkids sold to Topps

details

http://icv2.com/articles/games/view/2950/topps-acquires-wizkids
TOPPS ACQUIRES WIZKIDS
The Leading Producer Of CMGs
Posted by ICv2 on June 22, 2003 @ 11:00 pm CT

Topps, the trading card, collectibles, and confectionary giant, has acquired WizKids, the innovative game company that created the increasingly important collectible miniatures game category. The acquisition will provide Topps with a significant presence in the growing category of collectible games. WizKids' current games include Mage Knight, HeroClix, MechWarrior, and the recently released Shadowrun Duels. WizKids' growing presence in pop culture shops is reflected in the June 18 Diamond Dateline in which WizKids products occupied every slot in the Top 10 Games reorder list except for the #9 position. The Topps Company has long been the anchor of the contemporary sports cards category. It's the only company that has been issuing baseball cards continuously for over fifty years.

Topps plans to operate WizKids as a separate division. Jordan Weisman, WizKids' co-founder and CEO, will be responsible for the day-to-day management of WizKids and its 95 employees.

2006 - JW leaves Wizkids to work full time at 42 Entertainment, an alternate reality game dev he founded in 2003 with people he worked with on "The Beast" ARG at Microsoft.

The rights to PnP Shadowrun and Battletech currently rest with Catalyst Game Labs, after a saga worthy of a thread of its own.


SMITH & TINKER

2007 (Feb) - JW leaves 42 Entertainment to found Smith & Tinker, generally targeting a younger audience and linking video games to toys and the tabletop
2007 - Microsoft shuts down FASA Studios. Video game rights to MechWarrior, Shadowrun and other former FASA properties licensed to Smith & Tinker. Aims, in turn, to license them out to other developers.
2009 - Raises $29m in venture funding from a range of investors including Paul Allen
2009 - Releases Nanovor, a linked handheld toy and pc game aimed at boys aged 8-12
2010 - Nanovor dropped, staff cut from 55 to 10, JW steps aside from running the firm but remains on the board
2011 - Focuses on casual games for iPhone based on Marvel characters
2012(Nov) - Reported to have closed down

details

http://www.shacknews.com/article/50247/fasa-founder-regains-rights-to
Microsoft shut down its wholly owned FASA Interactive studios earlier this year, muddling the fate of popular FASA gaming adaptations in the MechWarrior and Crimson Skies series. But hope of new gaming installments from FASA properties has been restored, as electronic entertainment rights to MechWarrior, Shadowrun, Crimson Skies and other FASA works have been licensed by FASA founder Jordan Weisman's new venture, Smith & Tinker.

An announcement on Smith & Tinker's website revealed the news today, which had few details other than the licensing of the aforementioned properties from Microsoft. "We're not quite ready to announce our plans for each property, but please be assured that our goal is to surprise and delight old fans, while welcoming new fans to these fantastic worlds," the announcements reads.

A prolific entrepreneur, Weisman founded the original FASA role-playing company as well as the video game offshoot FASA Interactive, toy company Wizkids, and alternate reality gaming venture 42 Entertainment. His newest venture, Smith & Tinker, aims to pursue projects as a an interconnected amaglam of media types, spanning toys, games, books and movies.
***
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3654/interview_jordan_weisman.php?print=1
Interview: Jordan Weisman
By Chris Dahlen
9/5/08
Serial entrepreneur and veteran game designer Jordan Weisman has started a new company - Smith & Tinker - and he's not ready to tell us what it makes. But from his legendary resume, you can make some deductions.
...
Smith & Tinker is a new venture, and none of their game ideas is public. But he tells us a few things in this recent interview: Smith & Tinker is not targeting the 18-35 male hardcore gamers -- though they have bought the electronic entertainment rights to FASA-birthed franchises like Shadowrun and Crimson Skies back from Microsoft.

He's working on multiplayer experiences, possibly including ARGs. He likes toys and tactile experiences. And no matter how many companies he's launched, he's glad to admit that at the end of the day, he's "just a twelve-year-old in a much bigger body."
...
Are you interested in targeting more casual players, or the more absorbed, non-stop players?

JW: Hmm. [I guess] we'll have different audiences for different products. The majority of our product is not devoted to the 18-35 hardcore male audience. But we will cover a full spectrum.

Because obviously we control the rights to MechWarrior and Shadowrun, and those are traditional video game kinds of audiences. And we have great, great plans for those products. But a lot of the new stuff we're doing is in a different market segment.
***
26/8/09
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/microsoft-destroyed-development-culture-weisman
Since FASA's downfall, Weisman has successfully licensed some of his own IPs back from Microsoft and today plans to, in turn, licence them out to creative teams and publishers. The venture forms a part of his new company - Smith & Tinker - which yesterday announced it had successfully raised capital of USD 29 million to further fund its first release, Nanovor, and subsequent kids' entertainment projects.

The game designer plans to work with Vancouver-based studio Piranha Games to make a new MechWarrior title - "if we can put a deal together with a publisher - we're operating under some pretty tight restrictions of the licence that make publishing the games kind of challenging."

It's a situation Weisman admits is far from ideal.

"I guess one of the disadvantages to being old is that you outlive your children sometimes. And in this case, my children are owned by different people around the world and so it becomes a different kind of relationship."
***
MechWarrior Creator Weisman On IP Rights: 'Don't Sell 'Em'
http://www.gamecareerguide.com/news/24673/news/115617/mechwarrior_creator_weisman_on_ip_.php
21/8/09
FASA founder Jordan Weisman, co-creator of BattleTech/Mechwarrior, Shadowrun, and Crimson Skies -- and one of the game industry's perpetual entrepreneurs -- has learned a lot over his long career about managing intellectual property.

He now licenses the game rights to those franchises back from owner Microsoft at his latest venture, the cross-media company Smith & Tinker, which also fully owns the ambitious children's franchise Nanovor.

So what exactly has Weisman learned about property rights? "Don't sell 'em," he told Gamasutra flatly in a recent interview.

Starting with pen-and-paper games and moving into a number of different entertainment segments, the now-defunct FASA Corporation and FASA Interactive once managed an impressive array of fictional universes, most of which are now tied up in a convoluted ownership mess.

"You know, for twenty years, or a little less, we carefully managed those properties MechWarrior and Shadowrun," Weisman said. "We made sure all the video games, the novels, the games were all really woven together. It was all..."

He trailed off, then started to lay out the state of FASA's former assets: "We ended up selling both companies off to two different people. WizKids bought FASA, and then Topps bought WizKids, and then [Michael] Eisner bought Topps."

"Now, sort of, Eisner owns the movie rights, and all the story rights for MechWarrior, and Microsoft has the video games. And then I license the video game rights back from Microsoft."

Weisman added that this didn't just add complexity to the legal state of the properties, it had a direct negative effect on the brands. "Once that ownership got a little fractured, it became really difficult to manage cohesively," he said," and I think the property suffered."

Still, the recent announcement of a new MechWarrior title -- and unconfirmed rumors about some other classic FASA properties making a return -- indicates Weisman has no intention of letting the worlds he helped conceive fall into disrepair, even if he no longer owns them.

"One of the motivations on licensing it back was to get it back on track and create a more cohensive home for it," Weisman explained, "so I'm working with Eisner and his people, and with Microsoft, and we're trying to do this in a much more cohesive fashion again."
***
http://www.seattletimes.com/business/smith-tinker-releasing-new-super-hero-game-for-apple-devices/
16/6/11
Smith & Tinker, a once high-flying Bellevue game startup, is resurfacing this week with a new superhero game for Apple’s iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

“Marvel Kapow!8″ features characters such as Thor, Wolverine, Spider-Man and Captain America. Players use touch-screen gestures such as flicks to slash enemies with Wolverine’s claws or shoot them with Spidey’s web.

Smith & Tinker was started in 2007 by Jordan Weisman, a former Microsoft creative director. The company raised more than $29 million from A-list backers, including Paul Allen and a group of venture capitalists.

The money was mostly used to develop a line of handheld-game players aimed at young boys and built around a sci-fi monster game called Nanovor that launched in 2009.

That project was dropped last year after a restructuring that eventually cut the number of employees from around 55 to under 10. A recent check found Nanovor gear for 99 cents at Amazon.com, although the game’s no longer supported.

Weisman remains on the board and contributes to creative work but the company’s now led by Disney veteran Joe Lawandus. The company also relocated from Bellevue to space near the downtown Seattle waterfront.
***
http://www.binpress.com/blog/2015/0...n-weisman-mitch-gitelman-harebrained-schemes/
Jordan: Left and did WizKids and then sold that to Tops, and then did 42 Entertainment with all the ARGs, then did this big VC-backed company called Smith & Tinker. Smith & Tinker’s goal was to bring the video game dynamics to the tabletop, which sounds familiar – what we just did with our Golem Arcana. It was an early attempt to do that, and it relied on proprietary hardware because at the time, there wasn’t a handheld platform that could do everything we needed.

That changed, of course, as the price points on mobile smart devices dropped, and that’s what incented the creation of, first with Harebrained Schemes and Go Go Kiddo, because I just had my ass kicked by realization that dedicated piece of hardware was no longer going to exist or be needed to exist because of these –.

Mitch: Smart devices.

Jordan: Yes, the supercomputers we carry in our pockets now. I wanted to get onto those platforms and learn and start to think about what we could do with them and so that’s where Harebrained came from.

MECHWARRIOR ONLINE / MECHWARRIOR TACTICS

This is where things become more convoluted and unclear, but also relevant to the recent Battletech KS. HBS have repeatedly stated that they have no direct involvement in these projects, which is understandable as the Tactics game folded in very dubious circumstances and MWO had some publisher problems and has divided opinion in the BT community. But, given the background to the Battletech rights, the origins of these projects are quite interesting.


MWO

2009 - While JW was still at Smith & Tinker, talking about a possible MechWarrior5: "The game designer plans to work with Vancouver-based studio Piranha Games to make a new MechWarrior title - "if we can put a deal together with a publisher - we're operating under some pretty tight restrictions of the licence that make publishing the games kind of challenging."

2012 - JW now at HBS, talking about MWO:

details

http://www.shacknews.com/article/73...talking-with-shadowrun-creator-jordan-weisman
Breaking the ICE with Shadowrun creator Jordan Weisman
23/4/12
His last company, Smith & Tinker, licensed the game rights to Shadowrun, MechWarrior and Crimson Skies, which were owned by Microsoft since it bought FASA. His first try, MechWarrior, didn't go nearly as smoothly as Shadowrun Returns. "I put together a design doc on it, and an approach to the property and the market and how I wanted to handle it. We were not successful in raising the funds that we needed to do the game from publishers, primarily due to the platform restrictions of the license. It didn't allow it to be on any platform except for Xbox, PC and mobile. To do the big-scale game, publishers felt they needed to be on a minimum of two platforms." After this failure, though, developer Piranha Games rallied and came back with the free-to-play MechWarrior Online, which is due to launch at the end of this summer. "It's very true to the original Mech games of the 90s, but brought up to enormous fidelity," Weisman said, having last played it a month ago. "I was really impressed by what they've done, and am really looking forward to it."

Piranha Games "rallied" by getting together with a Canadian publishing group which became Infinite Game Publishing (IGP). Russ Bullock of PGI stated that they bought out the Smith & Tinker license in 2011: "Russ Bullock: That is correct. At that point we were licensing from them and then in Feb 2011 we purchased the rights from them.". After delays to the project and a reportedly difficult working relationship PGI bought out IGP in September 2014. It turned out that IGP was about to go bust (see MWT below).

details

http://www.pcgamer.com/mechwarrior-...ha-games-more-efficient-development-promised/
10/9/14
Mechwarrior Online scored a very respectable score of 83 in our October 2013 review , but it obviously hasn't been entirely sunshine and lollipops since then. Fans have complained loud and long about missing features, delays and a glacial pace of development that has left major aspects of the game in an incomplete state. But Piranha Games President Russ Bullock recently announced that publisher Infinite Games is no longer involved with the project, which he said has already increased the pace of the game's development.

"It's with great excitement that I share with you that Piranha Games Inc. has reached a deal with Infinite Game Publishing for the return of all MWO publishing rights to PGI as of September 1st 2014," Piranha Games President Russ Bullock announced earlier this week . He said that Infinite Games brought "passion and dedication" to the project over the past three years but added, "It can still be very difficult at times to make the corporate needs and strategies of two companies align."

The unspoken tension between the two companies is what led to the deal, which will see all aspects of the game, from design and development to marketing and hosting control, become Piranha's responsibility. Bullock also suggested that the change will get the development of the game back on track.

"It is our expectation that this will lead to much more efficient development and marketing of the product. Although we just signed the deal at the end of Aug, we have been operating under this model since the beginning of August, this is reflected in the increased community efforts and updates over the last five weeks," he wrote. "This is a good example of how efficiently things can be with all facets within the same office space, were committed to continuing this efficiency throughout the entire project."

Given that (per the above) JW was playing it before release in 2012, and that the mech models from MWO will be used in the HBS Battletech game, it's clear that the 'working relationship' remains pretty good.


MECHWARRIOR TACTICS

Mechwarrior Tactics was a turn-based F2P browser game also published by IGP. JW spoke positively about it in 2012:

2012 (Apr) - Mechs are also stars of MechWarrior Tactics, a turn-based affair closer to the BattleTech tabletop wargame MechWarrior is based upon. "It's the most true version of the original boardgame I designed 30 years ago I've ever seen," (Weisman) said. "That was exciting to see, and I hope it finds a new audience. Underneath the skin there is every rule of that original game."

Things became very messy though. IGP sold "Founder Packs" allowing access to the closed beta and supposed benefits in the final game. But in August 2014 one of the backers contacted Blue Lizard Games (listed as the developer) and was told that they had had their contract terminated back in December 2013. This was raised on the MWT forums and within days the website went down with an error message citing an "extended maintenance window". Some holders of Founder Packs requested refunds as IGP had continued to sell these packs throughout 2014 while claiming the open beta was on its way, despite apparently not having a developer during this time. On September 18 IGP issued a statement (http://www.bigdamnheroes.org/?p=1674) denying that the game was cancelled and claiming they were searching for a new developer and hosting location.

IGP then initiated bankruptcy proceedings on October 1st. The rights to the game were apparently sold to a "mystery buyer" in December 2014.


HAREBRAINED SCHEMES

2011 - HBS founded by JW and Mitch Gitelman

details

http://www.binpress.com/blog/2015/0...n-weisman-mitch-gitelman-harebrained-schemes/
Mitch: Smart devices.

Jordan: Yes, the supercomputers we carry in our pockets now. I wanted to get onto those platforms and learn and start to think about what we could do with them and so that’s where Harebrained came from.

We had actually, by the time we shipped as Harebrained, we’d shipped two entertainment titles and a couple of educational titles before we did the Kickstarter for Shadowrun, for Shadowrun Returns.

Alexis: I was going to say I missed that Kickstarter campaign.

Jordan: The first two titles we did – one was called Crimson: Steam Pirates and we published that with Bungie. That was a benchmarked title for Apple that year.

Mitch: And one of Metacritic’s best of the yea, best for the record.

Jordan: And then we did a game called Strikefleet Omega, which was one of Google’s Game of the Year for that year. It was a small team; we were only eight people at the time, but we had started to learn our chops on mobile platform, and then that’s when we did the Kickstarter for Shadowrun Returns.

2012 - quote on The Shadowrun Returns licensing,
http://www.shadowrun.com/forums/discussion/14369/jordan-weisman-reddit-q-a-summary
May 2012
Hoi right back at ya! A) We licensed SR from Smith and Tinker who has the licence from Microsoft, and are working with the Wizkids/Topps licensee Catalyst Games to make sure things are coordinated but that’s it in terms of working with previous companies on SRR.

2015 - When discussing the BT Kickstarter, states that "the rights held back Battletech":

details

http://www.usgamer.net/articles/battletech-kickstarter-7-things-you-should-about-the-game
The Rights Held Back BattleTech
29/9/15
After two Shadowrun games and the original creation of Golem Arcana, why did Harebrained Schemes decide that now was the time for a new BattleTech game? Because this year is when they finally got ahold of the rights to the original property.

"Frankly, it was when I could get the rights," replied Weisman when I asked about the timing of BattleTech. "Our fans have been asking for us to do this for a long time and we wanted to do it for a long time. It took a while to figure out how to get the rights. That came together this year."

The team at Harebrained will be led by Weisman, who's joined by MechCommander and MechAssault producer Mitch Gitelman and Shadowrun series creative director Mike McCain. That means the team is calling on strong veterans to craft a new experience in the BattleTech universe.

"I haven't made a mech game in 19 years and I made a lot of mech games over a lot of years," said Weisman. "Actually, I think the distance has really helped. As much as I love the universe, after making a lot of games, I needed some time away, to come back to it with the enthusiasm I have now."

It's interesting to consider the idea that the "rights" held back Battletech for a "long time". In Matt Chat 313 Jordan states that it was because the rights rested with Microsoft. I'd thought it a good move for them to gradually build up the capacity of their company doing the Shadowrun games before tackling it, but in terms of the rights JW had them licensed from MS back in the Smith & Tinker days. Of course, he then licensed them in turn to MWO and MWTactics. So, one can perhaps speculate that the rights to a turn-based mech game rested with MWT for a while. At the end of 2014 the rights to that game were apparently bought at the bankruptcy auction so perhaps the purchaser was HBS? If not, I guess it's also a possibility that they reverted back to MS or JW after MWT failed. Whatever the actual legal details, it seems the demise of MWT could have played a part in the BT kickstarter then getting off the ground.

Finally, it's also interesting to consider that the BT KS included Battletech pdfs from Catalyst and the game will include mech models from MWO. I wondered at the time how all this was arranged but given Jordan's history with these companies and the IP rights in general I guess it's not surprising at all.

 

[Infinitron]

Yes, I read about that myself. It's a bit odd how Smith & Tinker quietly basically turned into Harebrained Schemes without ever actually formally stating as such. Guess that's just how it's done?

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

Yes, I read about that myself. It's a bit odd how Smith and Tinker quietly basically turned into Harebrained Schemes without ever actually formally stating as such. Guess that's just how it's done?

Yes, it was reported as closed at the end of 2012 in the Wikipedia entry but that just linked to this and I didn't find any other announcements or articles on it. Some also said FASA Corp closed back in 2001 but part of it survives as a holding company for IP and it has a recently opened subsidiary so, getting back to S&T it could be that only part of it was closed.

It's pretty complex how these rights have been handed down through the companies and the pnp stuff has a similar saga after Topps bought Wizkids which I didn't get into (complete with "financial irregularities" at current rights holders Catalyst, nothing to do with JW though obviously)

edit: Just to be clear, I do think the main Smith and Tinker was closed and was just mentioning the possibility that there was a subsidiary that held the licenses that survived, much as part of FASA Corp kept going after 2001. But HBS was started in 2011 before S&T closed. And S&T is also different from most of JW's startups in that it wasn't a small sideline that grew, it had a lot of funding from external parties and he had a number of partners. It was also arguably one of the bigger failures (and in a later interview he made some revealing comments about the difficulty of "choosing partners" in business). So I would imagine that he only ended up owning a small part of S&T and wouldn't want to have these new projects associated with that corporate entity and all those other shareholders.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

For those who are wondering (like me) how things will work for Paypall backers
http://community.battletechgame.com/forums/threads/472

I backed the project using paypal instead of kickstarter, so how will that work for me? Will the information be sent to the e-mail attached to my paypal account? Also, approximately when can we expect to get the e-mail containing the info for our backer rewards, or do we even know that yet? I just feel I need to know for peace of mind, I've been rather paranoid about it all recently...

Ease those furrowed brows, MechWarrior! You will receive information about the BATTLETECH Backerkit some time early this December. Roughly 4 weeks from now give or take...they have over 40,000 accounts to set up and let folks know about, so the timing is an estimate. The BackerKit will allow you to review your BATTLETECH pledge, upgrade it to a higher tier if you wish, download digital rewards when they're ready, provide your shipping information if you'll be receiving physical rewards, and more. Yes, the information regarding the BackerKit will be sent to the Email address you used with PayPal to pledge to the BATTLETECH Kickstarter project.

I suggest, so that you don't miss the email, whitelisting the following domains in your email client: *hbs-studios.com, *battletechgame.com, and *backerkit.com - this way important Backerkit and Kickstarter rewards related information is less likely to end up in your spam/junk email folders.

Please note: There is currently a "Second Chance Backing" offer up on the Backerkit website. It's only temporary, to help a few Kickstarter stragglers catch up with the rest of our forces. Don't mistake it for the BATTLETECH Kickstarter Backerkit account you'll be receiving information about via email.

See you in the loading bay!

 

[Zorba the Hutt]

HBS just tweeted this 1990 BT arcade action with a young JW.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.redbull.com/en/games/stories/1331761904467/battletech-preview-and-interview

BattleTech: Robots in the skies
After two Shadowrun successes, Harebrained Schemes turns its targeting computer on huge mech combat.


BattleTech makes it after Kickstarter triumph© Harebrained Schemes

You know what we hate when we’re stomping around in our giant war robot? Sunday drivers. You know the sort: you’ll be plodding around some distant planet with your buddies looking for a juicy cache of old tech, when over the hill comes some have-a-go hero who can’t tell his targeting module from his sensor module, overheating his lasers and then falling over behind some crumbling building because his power-to-weight ratios aren’t properly calibrated. ‘It’s like they let just anyone pilot ‘Mechs these days,’ you think, as you pulverise the tiresome interloper with a rocket barrage.

That’s the potted promise of BattleTech, the latest successful Kickstarter project fromShadowrun creators Harebrained Schemes (and how: the funding drive pulled down $2,785,537 with just a mere $250,000 goal). Now in pre-production, it is (or rather, it will be) a tactical-squad-combat-meets-RPG set in the old BattleTech universe – the far future stomping ground of the late-'80s and '90s MechWarrior and MechCommander series.

As the head of a team of opportunistic, space-faring mercenaries, your job is to build up your squad (or ‘Lance’) of ‘Mechs, kit them out with technology bought, scavenged or stolen, train up your MechWarrior pilots and then set off in the ignoble pursuit of cash and plunder.

Succeed, and you’ll earn not just loot, but also the trust and patronage of the universe’s Great Houses. The BattleTech universe is a network of galactic fiefdoms – powerful families each vying for greater degrees of control over systems and planets, while scheming over the best way to stab one another in the back. “It’s Game of Thrones in space,” executive producer Mitch Gitelman tells us.

And much like the families of Westeros, BattleTech’s Great Houses know that while one might really, really want to commit grievous violence against a competitor, it’s often cannier to use an intermediary than declare all-out war. That’s where your squad of mercenary MechWarriors comes in. You’ll begin with deciding your character’s origin story, and progress from there to recruiting and cultivating your squad-mates. They’ll each have different affinities for different technologies or styles of fighting, and the mark of a good mercenary captain will be figuring out which of them deals the most damage in which ‘Mech.

Once you’ve mastered the day-to-day mechanics of running a mercenary ‘Mech outfit, the political machinations of the houses – and how you choose to interact with them – will add a further layer of complexity. As you might expect, your prospective employers don’t look favourably on commanders who duck their contracts or get too cosy with a rival House. A successful villain is a reliable villain.

“We don’t think in terms [of karma],” says Gitelman, of your commander’s alignment. “There’s no dark side/light side or anything like that. It’s more about, ‘this is a person who completes all their mission objectives, or runs from a fight’. It’s about your dependability and things like that as a mercenary, and what each of the Great Houses thinks of you.”

As with the old games in the BattleTech universe, you’ll also be deciding how to doll up your brace of ‘Mechs, perhaps deliberately taking on a mission that’s risky, but might return you lots of cool spare parts from the enemies you hope to destroy. High-risk missions will encourage players to work tactically, in a way that Gitelman says sets the game apart from the Shadowrun series.

“In Shadowrun, you run into a room, and maybe you leapfrog forward, cover-to-cover, while you decide which of your magic spells or which of your weapons to use. BattleTech is a very different animal. ‘Mechs don’t really take cover. You can run behind a building, if you want – until that building gets blown to smithereens.”

“‘Mech combat has a lot to do with the range of my weapons,” Gitelman continues. “If you engage the enemy in a very confined area, for example, and that BattleMech you’re facing has mostly long-ranged weapons, you have quite an advantage if you’re a short-ranged fighter. [Then] there’s also hand-to-hand combat, melee combat… We have jumping ‘Mechs, so we have something called ‘Death From Above’ where you can jump on an enemy ‘Mech. That’s a real risk/reward scenario.”


Concept art for BattleTech© Harebrained Schemes

There’s a balancing act here for Harebrained Schemes. On the one hand, burying new players under a dump truck of customisation options could be confusing, like asking them not just to buy their first car, but to build the engine as well. On the other, getting oily under the hood is exactly the sort of thing veteran MechWarriors love, and might provide you with a critical edge in battle. According to Gitelman, BattleTech will be accommodating either way.

“The way we think about it is in terms of layers,” he says. “The idea [is] that you could take an off-the-rack ‘Mech, and throw it on the battlefield and command it well and succeed. And if that’s all you want to do, great – you just field your ‘Mechs. Well, and repair and upgrade them, and buy or salvage new ones too of course.”

“The next [level] is, you might create these variants of ‘Mechs – a long-ranged version of this one, a short-ranged version of another, a ‘Mech that trades off speed for firepower, or armour for firepower, that kind of thing. But if you’re a tweaker, then you can go to another level and you can take that core chassis or one of those variant chassis and start fiddling with them. And then a layer down from that could be, ‘I feel like messing around with its internals. Should I upgrade its fusion engine?’”

“What we’ve said is that we want to make a game that isn’t fiddly, but that’s fun to fiddle with. It’s just a matter of layers, how deep you want to go.”


You'll be able to customise your 'Mechs© Harebrained Schemes

The point of all this tinkering isn’t solely to give you an edge in combat. As with 2012’s XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Harebrained Schemes’ hope is that players will grow invested and attached to the mercs-and-‘Mech teams they field, weighing up the risks and rewards of putting their lives (and their precious gear, obviously) in danger. To make this work, the threat of loss has to be real, which is why BattleTech will employ the system that made XCOM such a jaw-settingly-tense affair: permadeath.

“If you want to keep flying, so to speak, you’ve got to live to fight another day,” says Gitelman. “You’ve got to have the money to field ‘Mechs that aren’t heavily damaged for your next mission. So it really comes down to… Not spreadsheet management, but thinking like a mercenary.”

“XCOM is a good reference point here actually,” creative director Mike McCain chips in. “We’re building a procedural contract-generation system and we really want a good feeling of, maybe I screwed up a few times here but my career is still very recoverable. I have options. I’m sure it will be possible to back yourself into a bad situation. Our goal isn’t necessarily to prevent that, but just to make sure that there’s enough warning signs along the way.”


BattleTech© Harebrained Schemes

Initially, BattleTech commanders will be fighting a war on two fronts: either battling their way through the game’s story against AI opponents, or duking it out with other players in the multiplayer arenas. These arenas have an interesting-sounding twist to them: ‘arena’ here is not just nebulous dev-speak for ‘online-shooty-game-space’; it’s an actual, physical space in the universe that’s plugged into the BattleTech story. According to Gitelman, the idea is that head-to-heads between rival commanders all take place in a kind of galactic Colosseum – a planet that’s been specially put aside so that fighty merc captains can knock nuts and boltsout of each other for the amusement of the crowd.

“[Multiplayer battles] take place on a very specific planet called Solaris 7,” says Gitelman. “Different arenas are controlled by different Great Houses, different arenas have different rules of conduct. These arenas and these different rules cause you to field different Lances of ‘Mechs. So, you want to create different Lances of ‘Mechs and MechWarriors, and their specific loadouts based on the needs of the environment you’ll be fighting in.”

At some point after release, BattleTech will also get a co-op mode, though Gitelman and McCain don’t go into detail about what that will look like (“We all love co-op here – it’s just a matter of, first things first,” says McCain).

Usually, this would be the bit where we have to deploy the standard Kickstarter caveat. After all, there’s only so much that you can really learn from concept art and developer promises. But the neat thing about the modern age of crowdfunded gaming is that developers – even those with illustrious histories – no longer need to trade past glories for cash. We know that companies like inXile, Double Fine and Obsidian can do great things with fan money – they’ve each got a great game apiece to prove it. Harebrained Schemes, however, have two: Shadowrun Returns and Shadowrun: Hong Kong. No one should ever write a developer a blank check, but in the sometimes capricious world of crowdfunding, Harebrained Schemes feels like a safe pair of hands.

“We ship good games,” says Gitelman, bluntly, when I ask about backers’ trust. “First of all, we say what we’re going to do. We deliver the features, we deliver on time, and the game comes out and they’re in the 80s and 90s in review scores. So, we built up this credibility over time that allows us to go, ‘Here we are with a game that’s in pre-production, we don’t have much to show,’ but because of our track record, not only as game developers, but as Kickstarter developers, we were able to do that and be successful. So not everybody can do that. There’s no code there. It comes from really hard work and delivery.”

 

[khavi]

Kickstarter Update #21 - Backerkit shit.

Not worth more than a link.

edit: Still no add-on physical rewards, so apparently they have not yet or were not able to work out the rights.

 

[Infinitron]

UPDATE: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/webeharebrained/battletech/posts/1450313

Hey, BATTLETECH Backers!

Mike here - now that the dust has settled from the finale of our incredible Kickstarter campaign last month, I want to give everyone a short update on where we’re at in development. But first, before I do that, Robin (HBS_Dagger) says thanks to all the Backers who have answered their BackerKit survey!

However, there are still over 4500 of you that need still need to do this in order to receive their rewards! This is particularly important for anyone with physical rewards in their pledge level. We won’t be able to order the correct amount of Heraldry Kits and Jackets if you don’t let us know which ones you want and we need your shipping address so we can send them when they're ready.

If you haven’t answered your survey yet, go to this link: BATTLETECH BackerKit, click on “Didn’t get your invite?” and follow the instructions.The deadline is January 15th, but go do it NOW while you're thinking about it!! Don't worry, I'll wait...

Update Time!
In a nutshell - we’re a few months into pre-production now, and we’ve been busy prototyping and iterating on the core combat experience. As awesome and fulfilling as the Kickstarter experience was for us, it’s also been nice to focus entirely on game development for the past month!

With the scope of the game now clearly established by the funding goals we reached on Kickstarter, Jordan and I along with the rest of the design team have been able to really hone in on the core of what we’re making, and to start planning out the experience as a whole. We’ve established a strong set of design criteria for the game - for example: “I feel like all types and tonnages of ‘Mechs can be useful in combat.” And: “I rarely feel like concentrated fire is the only strategic solution.” It may sound obvious, but writing these goals down and referring back to them each step of the way really helps focus our prototyping efforts and ensure that the end result accomplishes everything we’d like it to.

The Merc Campaign


On the Mercenary campaign front, Kevin Maginn, our Design Lead, has been busy consulting BattleTech sourcebooks and furiously generating document after document like a mad-document-scientist, laying out some of the initial design foundations to implement those pillars and design goals.

The purpose of these documents is not to write a definitive spec for the game; the campaign game is just too big and complex to definitively document every possible outcome. Instead, we’re using them as a starting point to build prototypes that we’ll iterate on over the course of the next year of development. I strongly believe in rapid prototyping, team-wide feedback, and frequent iteration leading to the best possible product, and look forward to working with Kevin and the rest of the team to bring these designs to life next year.

Chris 00, Chris 01


Meanwhile, our Lead Engineer, Chris 00, has been focused on laying a strong architectural framework for our codebase. This is one of those things that is invisible now but will really pay off later. When designing a piece of software as complex as BATTLETECH, it’s critical to lay the right structure to build from, as well as define the components that the rest of the engineering team will build. This is especially important in a game that has to support both single-player and server-based multiplayer!

To capture how all of these efforts move forward, our Producer, Chris 01, has been working on a high-level block schedule for the project and planning our major milestones for next year. Our goal is to have a vertical slice (i.e. a representative demo short on content, but more complete development of high priority systems) of the combat game ready next summer and then bring on a larger production team to build out the environments, missions, and content around the same time. It’s a slow, careful burn until code foundations and content pipelines are in place and proven.

Story


We’ve also been making good progress on our story for the game, the core of which will be set in a small region of the Periphery on the Rimward side of the Inner Sphere. We’re not ready to talk about story specifics yet, but I’m excited about where we’re heading with various plot points and characters. I’ve been re-reading Dune and it’s been a great source of inspiration here - not for individual plot points necessarily, but for the overall tone of court intrigue, machinations and suspicions that we’re trying to achieve with the various factions involved in our narrative.

Art

At the other end of the BATTLETECH team’s corner of the HBS offices, our concept art team has switched gears from concept illustrations to actually spec’ing out how a variety of systems in the game will work. We’re prototyping the 3D portrait creation system and have found some great ways to get attitude and expression out of our MechWarriors so that we don’t end up with the “blank-stare-at-the-camera” style of 3d avatars that some games end up with. We’re also cooking up an Emblem Creator for your Mercenary outfit, and a flexible framework for the cosmetic customization of your ‘Mechs - so that you can select individual paint schemes and colors, as well as add details like additional emblems and nose art. We’re also starting in on terrain pipeline and development - essentially, how do we achieve this look, but with a full map that satisfies both gameplay and performance constraints.


BATTLETECH Art for Everyone!

You'll find a bunch of profile images and banners that you can use on your favorite social media sites on this Forum post. Feel free to use these to your heart's content!

And, while we’re not *quite* ready to show off any new art yet, we’ve posted a complete collection of all the Concept Art we released during the Kickstarter campaign in the same thread. It’s all the hi-res source images, so wallpaper away! (And if you aren’t on the forums yet, you should be! Here's where you sign up!)


That’s it for now - Happy Holidays, and we’ll see you all in 2016! -- Mike

PS: One other thing we’ve been working on is a plan for the player’s home base ship in the game - expect to hear more about that early next year! ; )

PPS: Also, in case you haven’t seen yet, the Steam Winter Sale has begun! All three of our Shadowrun games are on sale so this is a great time to grab our award-winning RPGs!

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

All they had to say is "I've been re-reading Dune" and they had me.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

http://www.gamereactor.eu/articles/...emes+From+Storage+Space+to+Kickstarter+Kings/

Spoiler

Harebrained Schemes: From Storage Space to Kickstarter Kings
We had a long chat with co-founder Mitch Gitelman about the studio that brought Shadowrun back to life and that plans to do the same for BattleTech.

• Text: Bengt Lemne & Brandon Green
• Published the 1st of Jan 2016 at 16

Harebrained Schemes were founded in 2011 by Jordan Weisman and Mitch Gitelman coming off the closure of FASA Studio, responsible for a great number of games including Crimson Skies, Shadowrun and Mech Commander, Mech Warrior and Mech Assault. Their first major project was Shadowrun Returns (2013, funded via Kickstarter) and this game spawned sequels in the shape of Shadowrun: Dragonfall (2014) and Shadowrun: Hong Kong (2015) both with their own separate Kickstarter campaigns. Currently they are working to fulfil the last bit of content for Shadowrun: Hong Kong that was promised in the Kickstarter, and they've just started up on their latest Kickstarter project BattleTech (once again going back to an old FASA property), while the promising and action-RPG Necropolis is closing in on release.


You've got so many different things going on so we thought we'd catch up and get an update on what's happening. Can you give us a brief overview of what's going on at the studio at the moment?

Mitch Gitelman: Oh my. Well let's see, we are hard at work on pre-production on Battletech after closing our kickstarter in October. So we got a pre-production team rolling there, a lot of good things are happening between now and the end of the year. A lot of documentation during prototyping, that kind of thing, and the BattleTech team is very excited.

We also have the Shadowrun team, who are doing Shadowrun: Hong Kong, they're also fulfilling a Kickstarter reward right now creating a mini-campaign that happens right after the events of Shadowrun: Hong Kong. So you can take your high level character from the end of Shadowrun: Hong Kong and import it into this new mini-campaign. I think it's going to be about a five hour campaign or so. Depending on the level of detail you play at it could be about seven hours. So that's coming out early next year. Also for Shadowrun: Hong Kong we just recorded an audio commentary to give to backers, so you'll be able to play through the game and as you enter different scenes you'll see a little icon. When you click it you'll hear the development teams' voices describe the making of that particular level, that kind of thing.

That's BattleTech and that's Shadowrun and the other big news from the studio is our big new title Necropolis is coming out early next year. Necropolis is a 3D dungeon dive, an action game, a timing based game, kind of in the Dark Souls model. We married that with procedurally generated roguelike games. In this one the idea is you go as far as you can, die, start over again. Get as far as you can, get a little further, die and along the way pick up all sorts of magic items and weapons and stuff like that to level up yourself. There's some crafting involved. The marriage of a 3D action game and a roguelike, we feel it's going to be a big addictive draw for people. That's a completely new and original title as well, that's not one of our old licenses that we brought back, so we're really excited about Necropolis too and that's coming to Steam early next year.

We remember seeing that one at PAX East...

Yeah, we won Best of Show by Destructoid.

A lot of different things to talk about. Let's start with Kickstarter. It feels like it's an integral part of who you are, the Kickstarter model and being there, connecting with fans. How would you say that sort of model impacts the way your studio is run.

It impacts us in a number of ways and your right, it has a pretty big influence on who we are and how we develop games. I think the biggest thing about Kickstarter is that it has allowed us to develop relationships with our audience and we love that. Making games, you know, more connected with the people who play them is a really big deal to us and allows us to interact on a level that previously we never had the experience of doing. I think the big thing about Kickstarter for us we are humanised game development, I think that's the best way to put it. Turns out that there are these hard working people making your games and to find out a little bit about who they are, what motivates them, how they work together, what the process is.

I think it's been a positive thing for the industry and the players. I really appreciate our fan base because they understand that we have integrity, that we deliver what we tell them we're going to deliver. That was a really big deal during the last campaign, since we had already gone through three successful campaigns. We walked into it with a level of credibility that was just kind of luxurious and we were able to interact with the audience in a positive way because of that. They were very excited about BattleTech.

So that was the number one thing, the relationships. The number two thing is that it does have a pretty big impact on how you develop that game. I won't call it positive or negative, I'll just call it an impact because when you're making a non-Kickstarter game, guess that's the way to start. What you're doing is that you create a high level vision, then they'll pre-production that, hone that vision and then you start prototype work. Then as you prove or disprove different things, you add or remove features. Until finally you come up with something that you think is worthy of shipping.

With Kickstarter it's a little different, the process feels very similar except for a couple of things. If we have committed to a feature in the Kickstarter we feel that feature is sacrosanct. If we told our backers we are doing this, we're not going to cut that feature, we're going to stay at it until we make it work. That can be a little confining but on the other hand, what you get is all those people backing your project and showing you support and that's a big thing. Because in the old days when I used to make video games, we'd come up with an idea for a game, you'd keep it very secret and then at a certain amount of time before you ship the game, you unveil it to the world and find out if people want it. That's a really hard way to make games, especially some of the games I've made that have taken over three years to make. So you're literally waiting three years to find out if all your hard work, if anybody cares at all. With Kickstarter you find out right away that they want your game or not, and it's a great proving ground from that perspective. Making a game for an audience that's cheering you on, sending you pizza and bagels to get you through the long nights or early mornings; that's a big deal for a development team. So I'd say those are the two major ways that Kickstarter has impacted us.

Would you say that you're doing Necropolis as a means to sort of do something that's perhaps neither one of those two things but perhaps somewhere in between?

No, Necropolis, I'm really proud of the process of Necropolis because, we invested in our own people. It's a completely original idea. My partner Jordan Weissman and I had nothing to do with the development of the idea. We just stuck a couple of senior people in a room for a summer and said, don't come out until you've have a prototype that you think you are proud of. So they came out with Necropolis and they presented it to us and we were just blown away.

First of all the art style, Mike McCain and Chris Rogers (our creative directors) really did a great job of setting it apart from other action games, it's just a beautiful game. That was a big deal but the idea of taking a Dark Souls-like, timing-based action game and combining it with a procedurally generated dungeon dive like Spelunky or something like that. Putting those two things together and design director, Dennis Detwiller, I just thought that was a really smart move. Nobody has done that yet, so the combination of those things really excited us and what's great for us as a studio, it's our first real-time 3D game as a studio so that's a big first. Another big first is that it's not based off one of our old licenses, one of my partner's that he's created like Shadowrun or Battletech or Crimson Skies, something like that. So it's not based on one of those, so we're really proud of that and then the other thing is, neither Jordan or I led the project. So it's a real first in a number of ways for the studio, it kind of represents a milestone for us as we mature as game developers.

Necropolis (2016)


Necropolis is planned for release next year on Steam (PC, Mac, Linux), with a console release still to be determined. Below you'll find an interview with Harebrained Schemes' Mike McCain from PAX East about the game as well as a trailer released for PAX Prime.
BattleTech. Was it always the plan to bring it back in this fashion?

Actually yeah kinda. What happened was, when I went to Jordan, god in 2012 and said, hey have you been looking at this Kickstarter thing maybe we could do something with this. It was actually November 2011 and we're like, I don't think this is the right time for it. Then Tim Schaefer came out with his and we're like damn it, we were right. When we talked about doing that, we talked about doing it for Shadowrun for Shadowrun Returns. The dream was always, wouldn't it be great if we could do this for BattleTech.

The rights to BattleTech were just kind of a mess. So we sort of stayed away from it for a while but the cool thing was, with Battletech, although we've wanted to make it forever and we knew we wanted to make it turn-based like the original board game. So we always had this simple vision for one day, wouldn't it be great to give back to BattleTech fans, the way we did with Shadowrun fans. Actually it was the Shadowrun fans that sort of enabled the BattleTech fans because, with the overwhelming support that we got from Shadowrun and the fans reaction to what we did, the great reviews. That caught Microsoft's attention back to us. Obviously we had the Shadowrun license and they were really positive about it but, once they saw what we did with it, it was actually Phil Spencer who is the vice president of Microsoft Studios who really wanted us to do a Battletech game. To his credit, he's a really great guy. He was a good boss when I worked for him and he's a fan of Jordan's. From his point of view this had nothing to do with money any more or anything like that or licensing, screw that from his perspective. He had a chance to satisfy BattleTech fans by giving us the license and so he did. He just wanted there to be a good BattleTech game because there hadn't been one in so long and, that's how that happened and I'm pleased about that to.

It's good when things can work out like that. It's not always the case.

No and it's good when a vice president at a major corporation, for no good reason other than he wants to do something good for gamers and grants us this license.

It can be the curse of the value of an IP. Even though you're not doing anything with it. It sits there as some sort of value for the company and they don't want to get rid of it, then no one gets to do anything.

Just to be clear, they haven't gotten rid of it. They just told us to make a BattleTech game.

But they wouldn't do anything with it themselves...

Exactly and he saw that as a no win situation.

But there were no strings attached, you were told to just go ahead and do it.

What kind of string were you thinking of?

Well maybe, we don't want to see it on a competing platform.

Phil's not about that. It's not about a lack of competition, he would love it if we supported the platform but not at the cost of another platform. He's not about that.

You mentioned about how the Shadowrun fans enabled BattleTech. Would you say that there's a lot of cross over between the two. I would assume that there is some crossover...

There's some but not a lot. We're hoping for much more. Now that we have credibility with Shadowrun fans, our hope is that when we make our Battletech game that they'll play the game because it's one that we made and they believe in us now. So there is a real hope there's a cross over and vice versa. When people play our Battletech game our hope is that they'll go and play our Shadowrun game and we saw that during the kickstarter, people were picking up the Shadowrun games to see what we're all about. At the very least they went to our Steam page and read all of the really positive reviews. We're really lucky. We've been treated really well on Steam-

It sounds like you went into the Kickstarter at a very early stage of the project with BattleTech and, that your still prototyping and whatnot. When did you make that decision? A lot of developers will actually have a game in proper development?

Right and the thing that they are doing when they do that, is to prove that they've got something of value. They have something to prove. Well from our point of view, we had already proven that we were credible game developers. We had made games that people had liked, made Kickstarter games that we actually delivered on. So with those two things, plus we had the guy who created Battletech, we felt like we could go without a prototype and we were right. But the reason why we did it one of the major ones is when you start a project, in order to plan it properly you want to know the complete feature set, you want to budget the complete feature set, you want to design the right feature set.

Multiplayer for example, determines a lot of how you're going to design single-player. If you're designing a single-player and multiplayer game, you have to keep both things in your head at the same time throughout development. We didn't want to do that without knowing that we were going to fund multiplayer and things like that. We decided that we would design the game and scope the game to what the audience said. What kind of support we got from the audience, and that's exactly what happened and they funded our full vision, so we're designing our full vision. Now we're also hiring additional staff to deliver on that vision and that's part of it too, that's part of the whole pre-production process. We didn't want to staff up and do all of this stuff without knowing if the audience was really behind it.

BattleTech (2017)





Almost 42,000 backers funded BattleTech to the tune of $2,785,537 on Kickstarter in a campaign that ended early in November. Below you can take a look at Harebrained Schemes' Kickstarter pitch video.



Again the Shadowrun team remains the Shadowrun team it's not like they're moving over to Battletech?

They will but not now. BattleTech will be the biggest game we've ever made and it will require additional people, it will require people from the Shadowrun team absolutely. For example we are moving the writing team over from Shadowrun to Battletech. It's a big deal but the other thing is, different games, different skill sets. So with Shadowrun it was 2.5D, Necropolis is 3D so now we have to staff up with more 3D people in order to do battletech, that kind of thing.

How large is the studio today, and do you plan to expand more?

The studio is currently fifty-five people at last count. Yeah we do need to hire some new people, as a matter of fact there are some job postings on our website (follow this link). So take a look at the postings there. Yeah we'll have a look, we'll do a little bit once the studio gets to two full teams. You need more infrastructure. Having the right task manager or IT or stuff like that. We don't intend to get much bigger at all. After that it becomes a command and control issue, you focus on running the studio and not making great games. So we don't want to go much larger.

We suppose you guys have been sort of around for that trip before, so you know sort of where to cut it off or you're comfortable.

Well we've been around a lot of trips before, this isn't our first trip around the sun. Yeah we've learned a lot. We continue to make mistakes, just not the same ones.

That's comforting. We've touched on BattleTech and Necropolis a lot, but I guess Shadowrun remains a very important part of what you do and you are honouring that final Kickstarter, Hong Kong. Do you see Shadowrun expanding beyond Hong Kong or are you taking a break from that with BattleTech?

Yeah we're definitely taking a break for BattleTech, because the Shadowrun team is going to move over and working on it as well. We're going to step back from Shadowrun for a while, let people rest. We put out three games in three years. A couple of things about Shadowrun. First of all we love Shadowrun. Shadowrun is now part of the DNA of our studio now and so for example, on the anniversary of the Shadowrun Returns Kickstarter, we celebrate. We get a cake.

Shadowrun was the time when we developed our reputation, it's where we developed our relationship with our audience. When we did the Kickstarter for Shadowrun Returns there were eight of us in a storage closet. No joke, we were renting storage space from another game developer and making games in the storage space.

It really is the little cauldron that we sort of bubbled out of. We take it very seriously and we love it. We would love to go back to it. I think one of the greatest things about Shadowrun, it's a great science fiction setting, not just a fantasy setting. Speculate, when you travel around the world the way we're doing from Seattle to Berlin to Hong Kong. When we return to Shadowrun we intend to return to a different place in the world, to see how you know, 50 years and the return of magic affects different cultures around the world. We think that's fun. Shadowrun: Hong Kong, the story couldn't have happened anywhere else other than Hong Kong, just like Berlin in Dragonfall. It couldn't have happened anywhere else other than the city of Berlin. So that's what we are attempting to do as we go all around the world but, I think the game will need to take a different form in the future. Probably fully 3D. We'll see what happens. We have to keep up with the times.

Shadowrun: Hong Kong


Shadowrun: Hong Kong (2015) is the third Shadowrun game from Harebrained Schemes released in three years (following Shadowrun Returns in 2013 and Shadowrun: Dragonfall in 2014). The team is currently working on an additional mini-campaign for Shadowrun: Hong Kong that is part of their Kickstarter commitment and it is due out in early 2016. An interesting note is both Shadowrun Returns and Shadowrun: Hong Kong had very successful Kickstarter campaigns.. Harebrained also had a successful Kickstarter campaign for Golem Arcana..

Don't say that, that might be the opposite of what the fans want.

Well it depends on what you mean. We created a very old school game engine. Our stories were very modern stories. I'm really proud of our story telling and how it improved over time. But the production values and things like that, limit it in the market. We'll see what happens when we come back to it. Maybe something closer to Xcom. In terms of production values, like being able to rotate the map and things like that, being able to go upstairs.

But of course not moving it to a different perspective something crazy like that, that's been attempted in the past.

Oh no, we're not going to make a first-person shooter or something like that.

It's been done.

Yeah that's what I heard. I read about it on the internet.

So early next year sounds like it's going to be pretty intense for you guys, with two launches then and Battletech development kicking in to full more gear. How do you see that?

I see myself working very, very hard. I see the team working very hard and I have to predict success because that's the way you do this.

How do you feel about a lot of things coming to a head there?

I think of it as beginnings. Whenever we launch a game I never get the sense of closure. You'll put out a game, go home for the weekend. Come back in a couple of weeks for a post-mortem that kind of thing and sort of codify what you've learned and what to apply to your next game and things like that.

Although I've had a lot of pleasure shipping a lot of games throughout my career, I've never gotten 100% satisfaction, I don't know how. Whereas the person who plays the game sees what it is, the person who makes the game sees everything that went into it and how the features could've been a little bit better with one more week or two more weeks. I'm just one of those guys. That's not pessimistic at all. I'm always proud of the team, whenever we ship something and I enjoy a lot of the games. I enjoyed writing the story for Hong Kong and Berlin and Shadowrun Returns but, there's always that niggling thing, you know like I could have done a little better. That's what makes us good game developers I guess. It's a tough way to live sometimes.

Finally, we'd like to thank Mitch Gitelman for taking the time to talk to us about all things Harebrained Schemes.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

When we return to Shadowrun

I think the game will need to take a different form in the future. Probably fully 3D.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

When we return to Shadowrun we intend to return to a different place in the world, to see how you know, 50 years and the return of magic affects different cultures around the world. We think that's fun. Shadowrun: Hong Kong, the story couldn't have happened anywhere else other than Hong Kong, just like Berlin in Dragonfall. It couldn't have happened anywhere else other than the city of Berlin. So that's what we are attempting to do as we go all around the world but, I think the game will need to take a different form in the future. Probably fully 3D.

 

[Ironmonk]

Don't say that, that might be the opposite of what the fans want.

Well it depends on what you mean. We created a very old school game engine. Our stories were very modern stories. I'm really proud of our story telling and how it improved over time. But the production values and things like that, limit it in the market. We'll see what happens when we come back to it. Maybe something closer to Xcom. In terms of production values, like being able to rotate the map and things like that, being able to go upstairs.

Well, that's not actually (very) bad.... the first thing I thought when I read 3D was something like fallout 4 3rd person crap, but since top down/isometric it's still in, I don't see it as decline yet.

 

[Jimmious]

Ofcourse it isn't. 3d is not our enemy, dumbing down is. If they keep making relatively complex and intriguing games and they do that in 3d...even better. I do like to rotate the camera indeed.

 

[ArchAngel]

I like that. Current Shadowrun engine cannot be improved anyways without big changes. They might as well go with something new.

 

[GarfunkeL]

Rotating camera is a waste of time. Just build your levels in a way that clipping isn't an issue. Having 3D can be very useful, to get height differences and to easily support more models and so on.

 

[Kem0sabe]

They need a new engine for shadowrun, the current one is extremely limited both in terms of scripting, level design and complexity as well as almost useless for modders.

Hopefully they are fully focused on pc from now on.