One of the things I covered closely when I was with Kotaku last year was the closure of Flagship Studios amid the crash-and-burn of Hellgate: London. It's difficult to see a long-running project with such high audience expectations fall on its face -- and it was made a little more difficult if you remember, by an uncommonly intimate look at how the team was struggling thanks to some honest thoughts from an employee.
That's why it was fun for me to talk recently with Runic Games' Max Schaefer, who's back in the fight at his new studio formed with the Mythos team (so visible were Hellgate's problems that it's easy to forget Flagship had another promising project in the pipeline that got crushed in the collapse).
Schaefer talks about what went wrong at Flagship, of course -- "trying to do too much, in every respect" -- but he also told me all about how he's taking a lot of those lessons to "try it again and do it better now" with Runic's new project, the Diablo-like MMO Torchlight (Schaefer's also one of the original co-creators of Diablo). Check out the stories!
Anyway, seeing a dedicated team come out of a bad situation with more wisdom and a second chance is always a nice story -- especially amid this awfully dismal weather we've been having here in New York lately.
Speaking of the end of a badly-executed MMO, this reminds me of something awesome my colleague Chris Remo did for us somewhat recently in writing up a firsthand account of the last days of Tabula Rasa. Love it -- do read it if you missed it!
