With the forthcoming release of MechWarrior 5: Clans, we are approaching four full decades of the mecha action series. It’s been a wild ride that’s taken the series in multiple directions, from single-player titles to a full online game. But getting to this point — and even getting developer Piranha Games the rights to work on the series — has been a long, strange trip. It’s a story that involves a spider web of IP ownership, a last minute lawsuit, and even the infamous Duke Nukem Forever.
Robot history
Russ Bullock is the founder and CEO of Piranha Games. He’s followed BattleTech, the tabletop wargame that spawned MechWarrior, since the beginning. First, it was playing on pen paper in his cousin’s basement. That was his experience until the BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception video game arrived in 1988. The first MechWarrior game came after in 1989, but it was MechWarrior 2 that set the gaming world on fire.
“That was the biggest game in the world at the time,” Bullock tells Digital Trends during a visit to Piranha Games’ studio. “It doubled the size of Activision. It seemed like it was coming out of every box of cereal, on every platform, with every 3D accelerator.”
Enough work for hire. We need to establish something of our own.
The MechWarrior series continued with expansions, sequels, spinoffs. Then suddenly, following the 2001 Black Knight expansion for MechWarrior 4, it disappeared. At the time, Piranha was working as a hired gun, contracted out to do coproduction on games like Need for Speed or Transformers, but it was eager to take the next step.
“No matter how good of work you do, how much you do incredible feats like porting ancient engines, you really aren’t going to get anywhere without creating your own product,” Bullock says.
License to mech
Bullock checked in on the availability of the dormant MechWarrior license several times with no luck. It didn’t help that the IP was split, with the video game, board game, and mini figs rights all going to different companies. Microsoft, which bought original BattleTech creator FASA Corporation, had the gaming rights. It was through Jordan Weisman, who founded FASA, that Piranha would get to MechWarrior.
“I happen to bump into this article that said something about a company called Smith and Tinker that had the rights to do the FASA properties,” Bullock says.
As it turned out, Weisman had left Microsoft, and eventually founded Smith and Tinker. He was able to get Microsoft to license the FASA properties back to him, and Bullock convinced him to let Piranha take a crack at the series.
“That was our big pitch to the universe to tell the publisher out there that rights were available,” Bullock says. “Piranha and Jordan were working together, and we created this really cool-looking demo, and went on the road show.”
The problem? It was 2008, and the economy was crashing. No one was willing to take on the project. It was a tough blow at a tough time, and Piranha was back to hired gun status in a rough economy. That’s when the Duke came calling.
Gearbox Software needed help finishing Duke Nukem Forever, the game infamous for one of the longest development cycles of all time. The studio asked Piranha to help with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 ports, and to handle multiplayer. It was a massive undertaking, particularly because of how old and heavily modified the engine running it had become over the years. For its part, Piranha pulled it off, and Duke was playable on both systems. That led to an important decision.
“Enough work for hire. We need to establish something of our own,” Bullock recalls. “So we came up with the idea of creating our own MechWarrior product, and self-funding it.”
The studio licensed the MechWarrior rights directly, giving it control, and started working on a free-to-play PVP game, MechWarrior Online. After an extremely strong crowdfunding campaign, it released the successful MWO. Piranha was home free … until a lawsuit hit.
CourtWarrior
Getting the rights was only half the battle. As it turned out, the drawings of the series’ original 12 mechs were licensed from Japanese anime, most notably Macross. Eventually, those licenses expired. With them, so did the rights to any depictions based on them.
“There’s this thing within BattleTech called The Unseen. It comes from the pen-and-paper side,” Bullock says. “It means you’d see something like a Marauder in-game, and there would be no artwork to represent it.”
For MechWarrior Online, the team decided to update and modernize all of the mech designs, including the Unseen. They were original designs true to the mechs specifications, but the expected lawsuit came nonetheless. After a year of legal battles, it ended in a settlement, with both sides agreeing to part ways, and not pursue the matter further. Importantly, it also meant that the new Mech designs could stay.
“We fought the fight that no one else would, and created an environment where MechWarrior and BattleTech can have these mechs now,” Bullock says.
Those fights, for both the MechWarrior IP and the Unseen mechs, lead us to where we are today, on the precipice of MechWarrior 5: Clans, and the deeply human story it looks to tell.
