Napalm Riot

Joe Ybarra is one of the original game producers for Electronic Arts. His roster of achievements in award winning games include Bards Tale and Starflight, and his MMORPG credits include Shadowbane and Matrix Online. At the 2008 ION Games Conference, I finally tracked him down for a chat about Stargate Worlds which will be published by FireSky, a subsidiary of Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment.

“How,” I asked Joe Ybarra, Senior Vice President of Strategic Operations at Firesky, “did you get involved in making Stargate World?” I wanted to know how a small software company that started out as Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment ended up with an IP like Stargate and the cooperation with MGM studios for an MMORPG.

In 2002, I was told, the original founders of the company were working for MGM on DvD work – the menus and additional features on the DvDs of movies they sold. The founders were really big Stargate fans and managed to obtain an option to develop a Stargate online game, and in 2005 hired Joe to run the project.

“I was employee number one and built Stargate Studios up from scratch,” said Ybarra, “The first thing I had to do was watch the series. I had only watched the movie at that point.”

There are ten seasons of Stargate SG-1 and currently, Stargate Atlantis is in its fifth season. There are over 240 episodes of the show and it took Joe six months to watch them all. During which time, he also made the level cap with his character in World of Warcraft.


(Read the rest of the interview here: http://www.mmorpg.com/gam…E=242&FEATURE=1948&bhcp=1)