Bill Roper Needs Work

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Bill Roper, of Blizzard/Flagship/Cryptic/his living room fame, gives a wide ranging interview to Gamasutra about what it was like to go from Diablo to a game considerably less successful.

But the backlash, honestly, was staggering. And I think it was, to me, the level and the depth of the backlash. It wasn’t just like, “Hey, I played this game, and I didn’t like it. It sucked. I hate this game. This game is the worst thing ever.” Okay, you didn’t like the game and all that. But it got to the point where there were personal attacks on developers.It seems like the layers, one is like, “Did you like the game or not?” You could say, “I think this game is horrible.” Perfectly fine. “Hey, I think your company is crap because it makes bad games.” Okay, you know, whatever.

But then I started to get… It got to this level where at one point, on our forums, at the same time… Kind of the backend of this all happening is I was actually going through a divorce at the same time, and somebody found that out and posted on the forums, you know, “Well, I’m sure that his wife is leaving him because he lied about the size of his penis like he lied to us.” I’m like, “Oh my… Really? Really? This is where we’ve come.”

The Internet, folks, we’ll be here all week.