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Mythic Founder Finally Founds New Firm
Mark Jacobs, founder and longtime CEO of Mythic Entertainment, has a new company now that his year-long non-compete clause is over. City State Entertainment is a venture that hopes to leverage its diverse group of "not just old white guys," as Jacobs refers to them, to create brand new IP in the mobile arena.
Jacobs and Mythic are known almost exclusively for two titles: Dark Age of Camelot, which was arguably the most successful MMO (non-EverQuest division) of its day, and Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, a promising title that completely failed to retain players after strong initial sales. Jacobs stayed on at Mythic long enough to see Warhammer launch in 2008 after selling the company to Electronic Arts in 2006, though he remains close-mouthed about the circumstances under which he left.
"At the end of the day, when you take other people’s money, you have to do what they tell you to do; I’ve done that before, and a lot of times it’s cost me," Jacobs told Forbes.com. For now, City State remains funded solely through Jacobs' personal fortune.
Hopefully Jacobs can recapture the creative spark that made early-era DAOC so amazing and inspired the potential of Warhammer Online, even if DAOC lost its way with later expansions and WAR fell apart two-thirds of the way to level cap. I don't expect anything along the lines of those games to come from the 12-person City State team, though if the developer manages to be reasonably competent it will immediately be in the 90th percentile of iOS/Android devs.
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