Warcraft Adventures

GameSpot talks with Bill Roper

GameSpot: Bill, what was your actual title and role on Warcraft Adventures?

Bill Roper: Producer.

GameSpot: And what did that entail?

Bill Roper: Attempting to make sure that all elements of the product joined in an intelligent and ideally timely fashion. Also, working very closely with all of the design elements. [Warcraft Adventures] was also a third-party game, so there was a lot of third-party management going on with the art staff and the sound groups, and then getting that all integrated with our design. So we were very involved in the whole process, through the life of the product, the development cycle. But a lot of that was going through and looking at the work and making sure that it was meeting our standards, and then seeing how it was all going to integrate and how all of that worked with the Warcraft universe as well.

GameSpot: For those who don't know, explain what a third-party game is as opposed to the games Blizzard's done in the past, which are first-party games.

Bill Roper: Right. First party [is] in-house, where the development teams here work on every single aspect of the product. We've done a mix of things. All of our third-party projects tended to be expansions. Diablo started as a third-party project, and then halfway through the development we acquired [developer Condor]. So it became an internal project. But when Diablo started, it was by Condor, which became Blizzard North, and of course, that was a third-party project, meaning [a project developed by] a company that was not Blizzard.

We're always very involved with those properties and those projects that are based on our properties. We don't just like to turn a property over [to someone else] and see what we get. We're very, very involved in the whole process. So a project like Warcraft II: Beyond the Dark Portal, or even Starcraft: Brood War, is done by third-party developers. But we have a very focused team that works on those internally, making sure that balance is correct, concept is correct, and that all of the elements live up to Blizzard quality and standards, what we not only expect from our games, but what we think our fans expect from our games.

Warcraft Adventures was the same type of thing. We had another company, another developer [Animation Magic], doing the artwork and the coding of the engine and some of the sound. We worked with them providing all of the design, the world background, making sure there was storyline continuity, and also did some of the sound recording.

Back and forth with Animation Magic