Gamasutra has published an interview with Joe Ybarra, Cheyenne Mountain's Senior Vice President of Strategic Operations, where they discuss Stargate, the culture and philosophies of Cheyemme Mountain Entertainment, CME's other products in development, and more.

I'm slightly unclear on how the company got started. Were the internal studios all hired completely from scratch, or did you annex existing teams?

Joe Ybarra: Well, yeah, the short version is: Yes, we built everything from scratch. And I'm trying to think now if there's an exception to that statement. I guess not, because we did pursue the possibility of an acquisition at one point, but for whatever reason, that didn't come through. So, we pretty much built the studio from scratch.

We started the company in July of 2005, and the company was basically started by a group of people that had a relationship with MGM, three years prior to 2005, for the rights to get the online versions of Stargate. And it took them about three years to find Gary Whiting, who is the chairman of our company, and our primary fund raiser. And so he thought, "Well, gee, this sounds like a really interesting idea, trying to do an MMO based on the science fiction TV show."

So I was recruited and brought on as employee number one, the start of the start of the whole studio process. And over the course of the next year, year and a half, we built up the first studio, which is Stargate Worlds Studio, and then -- as I mentioned -- about a year and a half later, we started up studio number two, which was at the time headed -- and still is, actually -- by Rod Nakamoto, who's our VP of product development. So, now we're a year and a half in the process, so over the next year, we proceeded to build two more studios. So we have four now, one of which is located in Boston.

It's kind of... I don't know if "insane" is the right word, but uh, to start a whole bunch of studios before having released anything. Maybe ambitious is the word.

JY: Yeah, there are several different adjectives that you could use to describe that. Yeah. (laughter)

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