Travis Baldree, formerly of Flagship Seattle, emailed us Sunday with the news release. He was the project director for Mythos and is now the president of the new venture. Baldree is joined on the management team by Max Schaefer, formerly executive producer for Mythos. Baldree said all 14 on the Seattle team are aboard — "basically the whole Mythos team."

The studio has a Web site, and the full news release is on the jump.

Seattle, Wash., Aug. 8 — The former Flagship Studios Seattle team is proud to announce their reformation as Runic Games (www.runicgames.com). As the team responsible for the highly-anticipated Mythos at Flagship Studios, Runic Games intends to continue to use their expertise in the Action-RPG MMO genre to create the best games in this market.

The studio is headed by Travis Baldree and Max Schaefer. Travis served as Project Director for Mythos at Flagship Seattle, and previously created the bestselling Action-RPG FATE. Max was the Executive Producer for Mythos, and one of the original founders of Blizzard North, the creators of the bestselling Diablo franchise. He was also one of the founding members of Flagship Studios.

Announcements about Runic Games' forthcoming projects will be made in the coming days.

For more information about Runic Games, or for inquiries about potential partnerships, please contact us at press@runicgames.com.

Runic Games [Official Site]

Report: T3 To Continue Hellgate, Mythos Development In SF Office [Gamasutra]

Unlike most games, Mythos has been running with our testing community for almost its whole life. I really feel like we’ve all done this together. And despite this bump in the road, I think we’ve succeeded wildly. This is undoubtedly the best game community I’ve ever seen. This is the best game development team in the world, in both Seattle and San Francisco. The things we’ve learned here, and with you all, will be with us forever."

The game's official site calls the suspension a "hiatus," but offers no date as to when private beta or further development will resume.

We recently spoke to Flagship Studios, who told us at the time that despite some rough patches after Hellgate: London launched, the studio was fully staffed and dividing its time between maintaining Hellgate and testing Mythos.

But in his statement, Schaefer said:

"PC gaming is changing, and I believe we’ve had a sneak preview with Mythos. With any luck, this will not be a long hiatus, and Mythos will be back. But even if it’s not, and even if we all move on, we’ve taken a lot of important steps forward. Game development is in many ways a continuum, and we all build on what came before. I know neither [lead designer Travis Baldree], the great Mythos dev team, nor myself are planning on doing anything but make games into the future. So no matter what, we’ll pick up where we left off, and you’ll be hearing from us shortly. We may not be the best business people on the planet, but we know how to make games."

We've contacted Flagship for further details and will update as we receive them.

Max Schaefer's Thank You [Via Gamasutra]

If we made a mistake with Hellgate, it was trying to do too many things for too many people. We wanted a cutting edge graphics engine, we wanted multiple business models with subscriptions and free play, and single-player, we wanted to combine third-person play with first-person play, we wanted to do random 3D levels, and when you're starting with a brand new game studio with very limited budget and no existing technologies, that was probably biting off too much. We ended up rushing it to market and not keeping it in the oven long enough, just out of necessity.

It's still a shame, especially when the game had so much potential, but it's good to see Flagship accepting and learning from their mistake and moving on to bigger and better things. Hit the link for the full interview.

Flagship's Max Schaefer [Eurogamer]

It's a short clip, but it gets the point across. Until we see Diablo 3, this is our Diablo 3. On a side note, if Blizzard wants my $15 a month, they officially know how to get it.

New footage from Dialbo-y MMO Mythos [via N4G]

Man those guys scattered to the four winds when they left Blizzard didn't they?

I kept forgetting to post this last week, but Eurogamer has a story up about massively multiplayer online game Mythos, being developed by Flagship Studios. The casual online adventure game went into public alpha late last week.

"For Mythos, we started with the revolutionary style of gameplay we pioneered in the Diablo franchise," said Phil Shenk, creative director on Mythos and co-founder of Flagship Studios. "Then, by offering it free to download and play, we made it even more accessible to players."

"By designing the Mythos world from the ground-up to be an ever-changing place, we can quickly and seamlessly implement new ideas from a variety of inspirations. Through the continued support of the Flagship community, we are striving to create what will be one of the most innovative role-playing games of recent years."

Too bad this isn't an MMO inspired by Robert Aspirn's Myth books, the Internet could use a good fantasy MMO with a sense of humor. Brian Crecente

Flagship's Casual MMO Details [Eurogamer]