Feature: 'An Interview with Red 5 CEO Mark Kern'

For today's main Gamasutra feature, we speak with Mark Kern, the CEO of MMO upstart Red 5, regarding the company's future plans within the crowded massively multiplayer genre, as well as specifics concerning Red 5's recent publishing deal with Korean-headquartered publisher Webzen. In this excerpt, Kern comments openly about the origins of his company, which was launched in 2005 by individuals who worked on Blizzard's phenomenally successful World of Warcraft, including why he left the company in the first place: “Well, originally I left, and I left in April of last year, and I did it because it was six months after the WoW launch when the beta for China was underway and I needed just to take a break from the really rigorous development schedule of WoW and the amount of work it took to get that thing off the ground, and to be with some family. I had a new son. I spent some time with my family to reflect on what we had done and what Blizzard had done, and what I wanted to do and the lessons I took from that. It really just turned out that I felt like there was this immense opportunity as a game maker. This is truly the ultimate gaming platform. And I don't mean from the standpoint of a business model or anything like that. I mean what you have here is something way more powerful than a PC, way more powerful than PlayStation in terms of pure computing power on the backend, right?” He then adds: “So everyone says that this round of consoles is ruled by graphics; after that, gameplay is going to rule, and what we can do with cycles on the CPU with things like AI and emerging story, and simulating entire worlds and giving people virtually an alternate life and experiences that are tailored around them maybe even on the fly. These are the potential things that I wanted to explore at Red 5 and that we're using the funding to research here.” You can now read the full Gamasutra feature on the subject with more from Kern about Red 5 and his hopes and plans for the MMO game space (no registration required, please feel free to link to this column from external websites).