Who’s Who?

The people behind Warhammer Online

Behind every game there is usually an associated group of people who have come together in order to make the best game possible, and sometimes there’s cases where a game is developed by that lone person surrounded by week old pizza in his parents basement.  Luckily with Warhammer Online we are looking at the former.  According to their developer profile page, Warhammer Online currently has thirteen different associated staff, each bringing their own unique talents to the art of game creation.  Today at TenTonHammer we will be taking a look at a select few of these staff members…

With Warhammer Online, the top name to start with would have to be President/CEO Mark Jacobs.  When it comes to Warhammer Online, Mark was the man who quite literally put the vision to paper, as he was the man who wrote the game design and vision document.  Mark has been in the gaming industry for years now, having been involved in the creation of an early MUD (if you don’t know what that is, consider it a research assignment) as well as the full creation of the game Galaxy.  Currently Mark spends his time as lead designer for the Warhammer Online project, meaning he goes over all produced content that has been completed.

As Lead Producer for Warhammer Online, Lance Robertson ensures the team is keeping on schedule, maintaining a common goal, and also overseeing project decisions.  Lance is also the person responsible for dealing directly with Games Workshop and relays the information he gets from them back to the Mythic team.  Lance has been involved in earlier Mythic games acting previously as an artist, lead artist, art director, and finally as producer for Mythic’s more recent Dark Age of Camelot.

Destin Bales is the Content Director for WAR, and as such it is his job to read through the hundreds of pages of documentation that are produced in conjunction with the other departments of the game.  With his position of Content Director, Destin also finds time to have a large Warhammer Army, owning a 3000pt Greenskin army as well as the beginnings of a new Ogre Kingdoms army.

Next up on our list of Mythic staffers is Steve Marvin (no relation to Steve Martin of course) the Lead System Designer for Warhammer Online.  As Lead System Designer it is up to Steve to get the design team working on different aspects of the game like the combat system, interface and character systems.  Having been in the industry since almost 1994 and starting with Mythic in 2004, Steve is a relative new addition to the Mythic team.  Currently Steve is playing a Tomb Kings army because of its relative ease to paint… a common trend amongst the developers at Mythic!

In the position of Lead Programmer, Colin Shannon is the person who whips the standard programmers into shape and keeping them on task.  Colin has been involved in the game development path in 1998 where he began working on several titles and eventually settled with Battletech 3025 by Kesmai.  Now spending his time on Warhammer Online, Colin has been with Mythic for the past 2 years also spending some of his time on the Dark Age of Camelot project.

Matt Daniels is the Lead Writer for the Mythic project and works on the backstory for the game as well as bringing out the “fluff” elements of the game.  The writing department also gets a lot of feedback from Games Workshop so they can improve the story elements of the game.  As a final element, Matt and the writing team review content made by the quest/world development teams so that everything in game fits the Warhammer World.  Matt previously served as Content Developer for Dark Age of Camelot as part of the quest team.

Of major note in terms of Mythic staff, a special note needs to go out to Sanya Weathers.  Sanya is the Director of Community Relations and as such she has to put up with people like the staff here at TenTonHammer, as well as other websites that are related to Warhammer Online.  It is because of Sanya that we here on the network are able to get screenshots, video clips, interviews, and any direct information right out of Mythic.  Sanya started off with Mythic in 2001 as their Community Director and has been working there since, dealing with the Dark Age of Camelot Community as well as the relatively new Warhammer Online community.

So there you have it, a quick overview of the major players at Mythic who are involved in the Warhammer Online project.  As more newsletters are released we get more diaries and information on the various different members of the project.  As always, we here at TenTonHammer try to keep communication as open as possible between us and the various different staff members of the games we cover… we also bribe them with candy, but that’s a different story.  Be sure to stay tuned as we get more game and developer information as E3 approaches!