Matt Firor, current president of Zenimax Studios and former vice president of development at Mythic Entertainment, gave an interview to IGN where he spoke of his past in Mythic during the turn of the century. The developer was primarily known for the Dark Age of Camelot MMO which was practically the most popular MMO of its day.
However, the threat from what was to be World of Warcraft was real. We now know that WoW became the largest MMO in the industry and that it is still around, unlike Dark Age of Camelot. However, it seems that Blizzard was not so sure and at some point wanted to start the talks to buy Mythic and end the competition with a stroke of the pen.
Blizzard flirtations
Firor acknowledges that they were not public knowledge meetings, but some people did know about them. “We knew these developers earlier as players than competitors,” he says, referring to WoW developers playing Dark Age of Camelot and sometimes they weren’t happy with the path they took in Mythic with their gameplay.
“They went out and visited us a couple of times… there was talk of ‘mergers’ and ‘acquisitions’ back then, because we were a private company… this was long before EA [Electronic Arts] buy Mythic. Those never materialized, but I think some of those discussions were based more on [ellos] just wanting to know how the sausage was made, than talking about business ”.
Firor commented that Vivendi, his publisher at the time, was interested in making relationships “closer” but he also considered that Blizzard was not so interested in talking about numbers, but just wanted to “sit down and see what happened.”
In the end there were no purchases, at least by Blizzard, but by EA which eventually closed Mythic Entertainment. Mythic right now is an in-house Electronic Arts studio called Broadsword, but they’re only limited to supporting games. So it is possible that going with Blizzard would have been better for them.
