After several months of relative silence, the leaders at 38 Studios have emerged to talk about their recently announced product, Project Mercury, and gave the ZAM staff an update on the future of Copernicus.

ZAM: Do you feel like the players are going to go into the single player experience differently knowing that there’s an MMO that’s going to be made out of this world?

Schilling: I hope so!

ZAM: A better way to phrase that question might be: Do they come into it differently than they might a game like Dragon Age or Oblivion? There might be MMOs made out of those worlds, but no one knows if an MMO will be made from those worlds or not.

Danuser: It’s important that every product we make stands on its own. Whether it’s a book or a movie or an RPG or an MMO, all of those products have to stand on their own. But, for those people that want that deeper experience, there are going to be elements where we’ve been very firm with to ensure that there’s a level of consistency in the continuity of this universe.

That’s a big focus of my job; I look at the work being done by both teams and make sure it fits with the key stories and the key themes that we’ve created with Bob over all these years. By having that attention to detail by both teams – showing that love and attention to detail on the smallest things – the players that are looking for those connections will find them in the worlds.

What I’m hoping is that the players that are really looking for that deep experience can come into the RPG knowing that there will be another part of this story that will drive their experience even further.

ZAM: How have things progressed since you first started working on the world for Copernicus? How much has changed, and what’s really different from what you expected it to be?

Salvatore: Watching Steve and the team really take ownership of the world has been the most satisfying thing you can imagine. Watching as these guys take the skeleton of what we built and turn it into this living, gigantic entity has been amazing. The evolution of the content and the team’s workflow from “I don’t think this should be in the game because we’re going to push it in this direction” to “Holy crap, that’s amazing!” has been phenomenal. You really can’t come into this IP without going through the team that’s here, because they have a definite ownership in the story that we’ve built.

Schilling: From joining forces with individuals whose entire careers have been built upon creating worlds to watching the team work on the stories found in the MMO to seeing those efforts get even more depth with the BHG team and actually being able to play through that world is mind blowing.

ZAM: After reading the Harvard Business Study on 38 Studios, did you know that when you started this process that it would become like it is today, where you’re prepping to release a single player roleplaying game before your MMO is released?

Schilling: I think I’m comfortable – and we’re comfortable – saying that we’ve never drifted off track. There were a lot of u-turns and detours along the way, but what it came down to was the fact that the more lessons we learned in the process, the more focused we became on the IP and what we were trying to create.

I have the most talented 160+ person team on the planet working on an idea by a guy who has spent his life building memorable IPs in a space that is growing by leaps and bounds year after year. We’ve never lost our focus, and I think that’s something, in this day and age given the capital intensity of this business.

As a note there was one piece of misinformation that was in the Harvard Business Study, I did actually tell my wife that I was going to invest some money into an MMO business. That said, I didn’t envision myself being this financially deep into this as I am, but I also knew that walking away from this project would have been the worst thing I had ever done.

Five years ago, I never would have conceived what this would have taken to build. I was like any other gamer on the ZAM or Wowhead forums, I thought I knew what I wanted to build in a game, so I wrote a check and tried to put my money where my mouth was. It wasn’t long after that when I discovered that it wasn’t as easy as I thought.

Running a game company for me has absolutely nothing to do with gaming. That was one of the most enlightening and disappointing and *positive* turn of events in the formation of this company.

Danuser: I think anyone that looks at Curt Schilling and his baseball career could have guessed that whatever he did after baseball, it wasn’t going to be small.

Salvatore: One of the most common phrases that we’ve heard over the past few years is “you can’t do that” or “here’s what it’s going to cost you” or “here’s what happens if you do this.” Thankfully, we’ve put together a team that knows how to say no.