Hello members and visitors of Gratis-MMORPG.com. Today we wanna give you an interview between our C.E.O. Mathias and Artix to read. We wish you a lot of fun with it!

Mathias: Hello please introduce yourself.

Artix: Really? He has not been released yet, but… sure, why not! Everyone, I would like you to meet Yors Elf, the half-elf, bard who lives in the soon to be released Mythsong Canyon zone in the MMO, AdventureQuest Worlds.  The Chaos Lord is he is battling is called the Composer of Dis-chord.  Unlike any Chaos Lord you have battled before you will be shocked to know that…

Safiria:  <PINCH>

Artix: Ouch!

Safiria: <Whispers> Mathias said yourself, not Yors Elf.

Artix: But…

Safiria: <Evil Eye>

Artix: My name is Artix. I am an honorable, undead slaying Paladin that quests to…

Safiria: <EVIL EYE!>

Artix: Adam Bohn. Founder and CEO of Artix Entertainment, LLC.

Safiria: <Smiles>

Artix: …and this, is the beautiful but deadly Safiria - Queen of the Vampires .

Safiria:  <sighs> Courtney Nawara, game project manager. Thank you for interviewing Artix Entertainment!

Mathias: Please tell our user a bit about your company.

Safiria: Artix Entertainment started building web based games 8 years ago. Our friendly team is very proud to have created the strange and popular games: AdventureQuest, DragonFable, MechQuest, EpicDuel and AdventureQuest Worlds. Each month, over 14 million unique visitors come to play. Over 100 million free accounts have been registered so far. The company is home grown and healthy thanks to support from the players, we have never had the need for any outside investors.

Mathias: How long does it normally take you to develop a new browsergame?

Artix: On average, it ends up being about 5 times longer than it should.

Safiria: How can you say that? You, Minimal, Zhoom and an overpowered coffee maker built and launched our first MMO from scratch in only 5 months.

Artix: Exactly – I expected to do it in one.

Safiria: </facepalm>

Mathias: What kind of work in the development process are you doing in-house and which do you outsource.

Artix: We do 100% of everything ourselves. From the first sketch on a piece of paper to the last line of code, everything is built by our team. Recently we just made our first television commercial. I was asked by our controller, “So, what company did you hire to make the commercial.” When he saw my warm smile and enthusiasm he said, “Oh no…. are you serious?”  We scripted, animated, and produced the commercial in two days. Because it was so noisy at the lab, we ended up recording the voice acting in the bathroom of my house. There were no effects added… so if you hear a little reverb on Galanoth’s announcer voice, that was probably just my toilet.

Safiria: We also answer all player support emails and phone calls right here at the lab. Between Nythera, Zazul, Circe and Lady Tomo we handle several thousand emails a day.

Artix: We grow our team by bringing creative players from our community onto the staff. So while we do everything in-house, we have team members from all over the world.

Mathias: How many languages are your games translated too?

Artix: The team is fluent in Visual Basic, C#, Java, Actionscript….

Safiria:  <nudge> Spoken Languages.

Artix: Oh….. actually, we have never tried translating any of the games out of English.

Safiria: Considering Artix’s terrible typos and grammar, I would suggest having it translated INTO English.

Artix: However, if any players would like to help convert the game into a new language you can join the forums and let us know you can help!

Mathias: Are we going to see a lot new games from Artix during 2010?

Artix: A lot of new games? The games created at Artix Entertainment are built with a lot of love and player involvement. We are focused more on quality than quantity.

Safiria: Which explains our 211+ weekly updates/releases last year. We update all 4 of our major games (AdventureQuest, DragonFable, MechQuest & AQWorlds) each and every week with a significant amount of content.  Between all of the new zones, monsters, live events, wars, cut-scenes, features, rare items, and special events it is hard for even the dev team to play all of the releases.

Artix: Having said that…. can you keep a secret? <Whispers> Aye, we are working on a new top secret project which our players are going to LOVE.

Mathias: Where do you see the future in browsergames? Will we see more 3D graphic or will 2D dominate?

Artix: It is the eve of the 3D revolution in web based gaming. In the future all game companies will be investing into high budget 3D games which will look and play better than existing downloadable games – yet play in your browser. That is why we are going to skip 3D all together and go straight to 5D. Adding two additional dimensions to reality is a small price to pay for staying ahead of the competition.

Mathias: What will be the biggest change in the browsergame market during next 2 years?

Artix: I believe the quality of the games in the web browser is going to be amazing. The tools and technology we have access to now did not even exist 4 years ago. In 2009 we built one of the first massively multiplayer flash based games with AQWorlds. I highly recommend keeping an eye on what we are about to do next.

Safiria: You can follow Artix on the AQWorlds design notes to see what he’s working on next. Of course, most people read it to see the horrific train wrecks the team gets themselves into with their weekly releases.

Mathias: When you started developing Adventure Quest and later Adventure Quest Worlds did you expect this big success?

Artix: No. Every day I wake up and am grateful to the players and team for the opportunity to make the games better each day. It had always been my dream to create a video game. When I was alone and created the original AdventureQuest, I was just hoping for 100 people come and play so I could say that “I built a real game.” Now, as I write this, we have an incredible team and just passed 100 million registered accounts. It is really an honor to work beside the talented people here at the lab and all of the players… we are like a family….

Artix: <pause>

Artix: …. a super awesome monster slaying, ninja pwning, pirate raiding cyborg disassembling, werewolf punting family of game design AWESOMESAUCE!

Mathias: At this point big thanks to Artix and Safiria for the interesting interview. We wish you a lot of success in the future and hope that more players are going to accompany you over time.