Curt Schilling: Three-time World Series Champion. Founder of 38 Studios. Bigger MMO Nerd Than You.

Steve has a seat with Curt Schilling, Chairman and Founder of 38 Studios, to discuss the lifetime of gaming that led up to the development of Copernicus, the company’s as yet unannounced MMO.

Topics covered include the allure of online games, juggling EverQuest with a professional baseball career, and why mounted combat on flying pigs will not be among the features included at release.

Read on for the transcript.

The MMO Gamer: First of all, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about what it is you do at 38 Studios.

Curt Schilling: My name is Curt Schilling, I’m the Chairman and Founder of 38 Studios. I do as little game design as possible, and I get to playtest what I think is going to be the next generation of online gaming experience.

The MMO Gamer: I’m sure you get this question a lot, but I have to ask, because it’s been the number one thing on my mind since I first heard about the studio, way back when it was still called Green Monster Games:

How does one go from playing Major League Baseball to starting an online game company?

Curt Schilling: I started gaming in 1980. The first game I ever played was Wizardry, which is still to this day one of my favorites of all time.

I got into the online space with Ultima Online. A teammate of mine when I was with the Phillies was playing it, hardcore.

I got into it, enjoyed it, liked it… But I’m not a hardcore PvP guy, so obviously I had some very challenging memories of those days.

The MMO Gamer: [laughing] So you played UO pre-Trammel, then?

Curt Schilling: Yes, pre-Trammel. Early.

The MMO Gamer: Those were the good old days.

Curt Schilling: That’s what I hear.

But then, somebody told me about EQ… I logged in to it, played it for a half an hour, 45 minutes, and quit.

Then I sat around the entire night, as you do with any good game, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it… “That was kind of cool! I’ve never played anything like that before!”

The next day I went back and I was hooked. That was all I played for the next four or five years.

Right around that time Sony found out that I played, and they invited me in for the VIP stuff.

I was already thinking about post-baseball, and what I wanted to do with my life. I knew I wanted to do something with a business, but not like a restaurant… not a thing that other people were doing.

More importantly to me, I wanted to do something that I was passionate about, and something that I was smart about.

I was definitely passionate about gaming, but I certainly wasn’t smart about it.

So, I turned my relationship with Sony into a kind of due diligence. I started to go in and talk to the people at the ground level, boots on the ground, people making the games.

I wanted to understand the industry, what works, what doesn’t. Why they liked their company, why they didn’t like their company.

I did that across the industry, to try and determine what the playing field was like, who the competitors were.

Obviously this was a time when it was just EQ, then it was Asheron’s Call, and DAoC… and then all of a sudden you had WoW, and it exploded into the mainstream.

The MMO Gamer: What was it that drew you to MMOs, in particular?

Curt Schilling: It’s been my choice of game for a lot of reasons.

The most important one for me was, doing what I do for a living, going out socially is not as easy for me as it is for other people.

But in an MMO, it’s painless. No one knows who I am. I can hang out, and have friends, and be whoever I want to be, without being Curt Schilling.

The great thing was, it got to the point where everybody that I played with—and still do play with—they knew exactly who I am, and none of them cared. Which is really cool for me.

Probably the biggest thing for me as a parent, and as a person who has heard all the arguments for and against gaming, and violence, and all of that crap… if it wasn’t for MMOs, I would not have the relationship that I have with my kids.

I’ve traveled my whole life. They were a way for me to log on when I was in San Diego, and my boys would log on in Boston, and we’d have our headsets on like we were in the same room playing together.

We’d group up, and within the MMO game space there are a lot of things you can teach people: You’re in a group, you have responsibility, you have a role, there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things… You have to socially interact with people, and there’s a right way and a wrong way to do that.

So my kids, when they were beginning to learn to read and write, could type and communicate on a keyboard, which is going to be a medium which they’re going to use their entire lives, when they were five and six.

I looked at it as a powerful tool to enable education, and positive things with my kids. As opposed to all of the negative things that were going on with video games, violence, and all of that other stuff.

The MMO Gamer: Impressive that you managed to juggle EQ with a professional sports career.

I knew guys who couldn’t even handle working at the grocery store and playing EQ at the same time.

Curt Schilling: Well, my wife would argue that I didn’t juggle it well.

It’s funny because there were times—and people find this hard to believe—but you have times when you’re sitting at the keyboard playing, and you’re thinking about work, right?

People can’t believe that I would be at work thinking about playing games.

There would be times when I was sitting in the dugout, where I’d be looking at the clock thinking, “If the ninth inning is over by 11, I’ll be able to get back and raid by 12:30!”

But I’m a gamer, that’s how we think.

And then I’d meet people across the country that I’d played with, because I’d travel all the time, I’d give them tickets to games, say hello, put names to faces…

My celebrity really became a non-issue, which was a big, huge issue for me. In the game space, me playing baseball doesn’t buy me any credibility—and it shouldn’t.

Gamers don’t give a shit that I won three World Series. They care if we make a great game or not.

The more they understand my credibility as a gamer, and my beliefs as a visionary for the company, hopefully the more they’ll understand what we’re doing.

Continued on next page…

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