// PC GAMER — GAMING
For Warhorse's 15th birthday, we chatted with its co-founder about the demand for 'grown-up' RPGs, AI, why games are too cheap, and his role in the collapse of communism
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Martin Klíma is an iconoclast. As the co-founder of Warhorse Studios, he's responsible for one of the crunchiest, most peculiar, and best RPGs of the last decade—Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, a game few other studios would make. As a former student rabblerouser in the old eastern bloc, he's the only person I've ever spoken to for this job who can say they helped overthrow a government.
He's celebrating the Warhorse's 15th anniversary, a milestone moment in a life that has a lot of them already. "I'd swear it was just yesterday," he says, that he and his fellow co-founder—the eternally fractious Daniel Vávra—were two disaffected devs striking out on their own. But Klíma's career did not begin with the incorporation of Warhorse Studios. It began in the actually existing socialism of Czechoslovakia, in the 1980s.
"I was learning English at school, but it was sort of difficult," recalls Klíma. English educational materials had to be imported from friendly countries, and the only friendly English-speaking country at the time was Ghana, whose materials were miles away from the things Klíma was actually interested in. "I mean no disrespect to the people of Ghana, but it's a bit of an unusual approach to teaching kids English, and so our vocabulary was more about combine harvesters and blast furnaces than swords and dwarves."
What Klíma wanted to read, more than anything, was The Lord of the Rings. But although The Hobbit had been officially published in Czechoslovakia, there was no such luck for LOTR. Around 1987, Klíma was able to get his hands on a copy that someone had brought back from a trip westwards, "but I didn't know enough English to read it, so I had to improve my English. One thing leads to another, and the very fact that we can talk to each other right now is because of JRR Tolkien."
The first movie adaptation of The Hobbit was, in fact, this 1967 animation produced in Prague.
Not long after, Klíma was lucky enough to obtain another imported fantasy treasure: a Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set. "I think for everybody who experiences a role-playing game for the first time, it's an amazing experience: this idea that you can pretend to be somebody else, and you can assume a role and you can live through these amazing adventures in your fantasy."
The game gave him a kind of missionary fervour, a desire to spread the good word of D&D. "I started translating it with my then-girlfriend, now wife, and we went through maybe 80% of the text." The thinking was to publish a translation of the game via Czechoslovakia's underground printing presses; "to officially translate it, officially license it… that was completely unthinkable." Klíma already had experience in this sort of thing—he ran a fanzine that quietly printed popular sci-fi by "[pretending] that they were contributions to our student magazine."
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Klíma's dreams of clandestine TTRPG distribution were disrupted by the other part of his life. The group he played D&D with was, in fact, a subset of an independent student union that he and his allies were organising, Stuha. As a student at the University of Prague, Klíma had organised a petition against the demolition of campus buildings. Not, ordinarily, a revolutionary act, but to the flighty Czechoslovakian government it was a "borderline rebellion."