GFW: You've had an interesting last year, to say the least. So, how the hell are you, Bill?

BR: Doing OK, all things considered. Yeah, alive and breathing -- better than the alternative. It's definitely been an interesting six to eight months since the Hellgate launch. Been a lot of things going on since October. Seems like longer than that. I spent a lot of hours in the office, sleeping on the floor, phone calls all across the world, working on stuff....

GFW: So let me ask you one question about the office right now. Is there still a Flagship office that has employees in it?

BR: Sort of? I know it's a weird answer, but, yeah, we do. We announced [on July 11] that we had to lay off the vast majority of the employees, but there's still a small handful of the founders working on things. Really, our focus now has been on how we best take care of the guys that aren't there anymore and help them find jobs with other teams. We handpicked everybody, both on the game-content side and the online-technology side. So we're really working to get those guys placed. Then, past that, we've been spending a lot of time trying to take care of our creditors and other fiscal challenges. But it's definitely at the point where we're not exactly trying to plot a gigantic turnaround with a bright, rosy future at Flagship. It's unfortunately more the other side of the coin.

GFW: So is it really a matter of how to end it gracefully? Is that fair to say?

BR: Yeah. It really is. We're working hard on how to end gracefully. Obviously, we've got people we owe money to, so we're doing absolutely everything in our power to get those people the money we owe them, whether that's on an institutional side, lenders, or, equally as important, with our employees who aren't there anymore.

GFW: OK, so let's back up and talk a little about exactly what went down here.

BR: Well, we've basically spent the last eight months, after we shipped Hellgate and had Mythos in development, looking at what the next phase was for Flagship. For us, the main concern was trying to find the right partnership. We knew that we had to take the step past just project funding into studio funding. We were really open with our guys about that and said that this is what we're pursuing. So we started that, talking with potential investors, other companies, publishers [and] trying to find the right partnership that would allow us to put the proper focus on making the best games we could.

GameCyte: So when did this process begin?

Travis Baldree: We started getting ourselves reformed pretty shortly after the closure of Flagship, and it took us several weeks to actually get it completed, but we started pretty much right away. All of our team knew that they wanted to stay on.

Max Schaefer: I think that was the most important thing — that everyone on the team wanted to keep working together, and however that had to happen, we were going to do it.

TB: We all really believed in what we were doing with Mythos, and wanted to get right back to doing that again, and get — if not Mythos itself, something along those lines — to market.

GameCyte: And you say Flagship Studios did close?

TB: Max, are they still kind of open?

MS: It’s barely open. It’s just open enough to take care of the final affairs, but for all intents and purposes it’s closed down.

GameCyte: We’d figured as much, but all we’d had was a press release saying “We’re still open!” “We still have our IP!” It’s hard to tell what’s actually going on.

TB: It’s a little bit of a new experience for all of us. (chuckles) We don’t exactly know the ‘proper’ way to close down a company. First and foremost, we’re just trying to take care of the debts and the employees in an orderly fashion, so Bill [Roper, CEO of Flagship Studios] and one or two other people have stuck around and are doing their best to get that done before we move on in different directions.