Red 5 Talks MMOs, $18.5M Investment

Red 5, a young indie studio formed by key World of Warcraft dev team members, has raised $18.5 million in VC funding. Next-Gen spoke with CEO Mark Kern about the deal and Red 5's vision of the MMO.

When World of Warcraft team lead Kern, art director William Petras, Blizzard Korea founder Taewon Yun and other talented game developers gathered to found Red 5 in September 2005, interest was certainly piqued. After all, Red 5 is home to some of the guys that worked on blockbusters like World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Warcraft III and Diablo II. You familiar?

So now Red 5 appears to be the most recent indie to benefit from a good chunk of VC funding. Kern said that the money is not actually for title development, but to build Red 5's platform. "We're not really a PC company or a PlayStation or 360 company," he said. "We're really about building an MMO as a platform. Because you've got essentially what's a supercomputer on the backend, the question for us as game makers is what to do with that. We've barely scratched the surface."

He added that the investors, Benchmark Capital and Sierra Ventures, have relevant experience in the tech area. Benchmark has invested in companies including JAMDAT, Linden Lab (online game Second Life) and eBay, while Sierra invests across a wide range of sectors...