Warhorse Studios Co-Founder Reflects on 15 Years, Grown-Up RPGs, and Early Clandestine Roots

Warhorse Studios is celebrating its 15th anniversary, marking a major milestone for the studio behind Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. In a recent interview reflecting on the studio and his long career, co-founder Martin Klíma discussed the path that led him into the games industry. Klíma and fellow co-founder Daniel Vávra originally formed Warhorse Studios as disaffected developers striking out on their own. Long before founding the studio in 2011, Klíma worked on computer titles such as Fish Fillets, Original War, and UFO: Aftermath under the Altar Interactive brand.

Klíma's background extends back to 1980s Czechoslovakia, where he encountered early fantasy role-playing games through an imported Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set. Because official distribution was impossible under the communist regime, Klíma and his future wife translated about 80 percent of the text for underground printing presses. Those clandestine publishing efforts were temporarily disrupted by his involvement in student political activism. As an organizer for the independent student union Stuha, Klíma helped lead a petition against campus demolitions and later spoke at the November 17, 1989 demonstration that helped spark the Velvet Revolution.

Following the collapse of the regime and the transition to capitalism, Klíma attempted to contact official D&D publisher TSR to license the game, but received no response. Inspired instead by German tabletop role-playing games, he rewrote his translated materials into a new creation called Dračí doupě, utilizing six-sided and ten-sided dice because Czechoslovakia lacked the manufacturing means for twenty-sided dice. Dračí doupě became a massive success as the first fantasy role-playing game in the region.

Klíma's career between the 1989 revolution and the founding of Warhorse included persistent frustrations with traditional publishers. These tensions peaked in the late 2000s during development on an ambitious role-playing game titled Vision, which was led by Czech designer Vlaada Chvátil and published by CDV Software before running into severe publisher disagreements.