Chris Metzen has announced that he has launched a brand-new tabletop gaming company called Warchief Gaming!
Metzen was formally the Senior Vice President of Story and Franchise Development at Blizzard Entertainment as well as the voice of Warchief Thrall and Ragnaros the Firelord in World of Warcraft. Metzen also hosted several of the earlier Blizzcons where during the one where Cataclysm was unveiled, he gave his famous “Geek Is” speech to open the convention.
Metzen is co-founding this new company alongside another former Blizzard employee, Mike Gilmartin, who was formerly the Vice President of Quality Assurance. They are also being joined by Ryan Collins who was a former developer who worked on Hearthstone. He is now serving as Warchief’s Lead Product Developer.
Metzen conducted an interview with Venturebeat where he stated the following:
For the past couple of years, Metzen has been enjoying playing tabletop games with friends in a club, talking with them for hours at a time and enjoying himself. That helped him heal his mind from a kind of burnout and it made him hungry to create worlds again.
Metzen opened up about that sense of burnout and creative exhaustion. He felt like he didn’t have a safety net, and that asking for help wasn’t an easy option. He left, relaxed, and is recharged again.
“Tabletop is where I learned to be creative with my friends growing up, playing D&D, playing Warhammer,” he said. “Loving these ideas and playing these games in the same space as my best friends. Those are some of my most cherished memories. At 47, I come back to that. Even after that glorious Blizzard experience, I want that intimate scale again. This is my path.”
He added, “I’ve always felt that even things like World of Warcraft, which is still my favorite video game of all time, they’re reaching for what D&D does. I don’t mean to sound arrogant in saying that. For my entire career at Blizzard, I was trying to chase the feelings that tabletop had always given me. Whether I was playing a role-playing game or a wargame, I just wanted to feel those things with the people I was playing with.”
You can read the entire interview here
If you would like to check out Metzen’s announcement video for announcing the new company, you can do so below:
