Bill Roper on FTL Podcast

So we managed to score an interview with the venerated Bill Roper on our podcast, For the Lore . Needless to say he’s kind of a big deal in the gaming industry. IGN named him 41st in the top 100 game creators of all time, and with good reason. His track record pretty much covers every Blizzard title prior to World of Warcraft and currently sits pretty with Champions Online at the forefront. Make sure that you tune in on Monday, November 30th at 6:30PM EST to our Ustream page for the live recording.

If you’re going to put in the hard hours at a company, the list of prospects better than Blizzard Entertainment isn’t terribly long. Some might even say the house that Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo built is at the top of that list, which probably explains why Bill Roper has spent so much of his career there building those aforementioned titles — in particular the latter one as part of the Blizzard North team. Roper’s extensive history, not surprisingly, shares a very common theme of role-playing games, but then that’s always been Blizzard’s bread and butter.

After handling a myriad of audio duties ranging from composition to voice work on some of Blizzard’s earliest titles, Roper quickly began to wear quite a few hats, ranging from scriptwriting to manual design to, eventually, a production and oversight role with subsequent entries in Blizzard’s flagship series. Fittingly, when he left the company to start his own, christening it Flagship Studios (which would only release Hellgate: London before closing its doors), most of the RPG experience would come to be something of an asset. Even after Flagship was shut down, Roper quickly found a home at Cryptic Studios working on Champions Online, and plying much of his considerable experience with the genre into future products.

Oft times serving as a figurehead and company spokesperson in addition to his normal development duties, Roper continues to be a public face for the products he works on. Given his humble beginnings at a (then) smallish dev house with a chilly name, that’s not a bad way to make a living.