Mythic Games started with director Benoit Vogt’s game Mythic Battles – Pantheon. The game was originally published with Iello back in 2012, but Vogt was hoping to do a more involved game with miniatures, so he and Leonidas Vesperini decided to take a new version of the game to Kickstarter. They partnered with Monolith Games on the Kickstarter (see "Mythic Games' 'Mythic Battles' Reborn as 'Mythic Battles: Pantheon'").
Mythic eventually sold off their half of the game to Monolith and moved on to other projects, including a very successful Kickstarter for Time of Legends – Joan of Arc. "Across the pledge manager and the Kickstarter itself, we had $4.4 million for that." Drummond said. "We had just 13 backers shy of 10,000 backers on the Kickstarter, which was just incredible. It was at that point where Benoit and Leo said, ‘OK, we can stay small. We can just focus on Joan of Arc, or we can take this to the next level and become a real publisher.’"
Deciding to grow, Mythic ran Kickstarters for Solomon Kane and Reichbusters. Now the publisher is concentrating first on getting Joan of Arc to its Kickstarter backers this year. "That's our first priority," Drummond said. Then "We have announced at GAMA, though, that we have the retail product that we're going to bring to stores in November. That's a two-player core set essentially for Joan of Arc that will be $60 MSRP, and will come with some scenarios that are stripped down. They are not the same as the scenarios in the Kickstarter, because the core box in the Kickstarter [has] over 250 minis… before any stretch goals were added. We had to strip down and make more simplified scenarios for the 73 minis that are actually coming in the retail box." While simpler, the retail version will include exclusive content not available in the Kickstarter.
The differentiation between the products going to Kickstarter and trade is a core Mythic Games strategy, according to Drummond. "One thing I want to say very clearly, though, to backers, and to anybody who's been with us for the past couple of years as we've grown, none of the Kickstarter exclusive content or the super exclusives that we already did will ever go to retail," he said. "We're never going to do that, and we want to be a company that honors our backers first."
The retail product will open new opportunities for Mythic, Drummond believes. "We also want Time of Legends to grow into a brand that we can continue to support long term," he said. "That will enable us to do a lot of things. It will enable us to grow the audience. We could even look at more updates and future play for our battle move system, and potentially, if there's a real interest in the mechanics of the game, an organized play system in the future. That's something we haven't spoken a lot about at all, but the mechanics support it, and we as a company would love to make that a thing."
Beyond Time of Legends: Joan of Arc, trade release plans for Solomon Kane and Reichbusters, if any, have not been announced.
