From Bedroom to Boardroom – The Story of Derek Paxton

Feature by Tom Williams

This September, Derek Paxton was made Vice President of Stardock Entertainment after just three years of working at the studio. As a fan of Paxton’s work prior to him joining the company, I thought I would take a look at his fascinating career; how a software developer working for Novell fulfilled his dream of working in games development and rose rapidly to a position of authority in a prestigious game developer. Let’s start from the beginning.

Way back in December 2005, a man named Derek “Kael” Paxton created a thread on Civ Fanatics showcasing his mod for Civilization IV, Fall From Heaven. The mod was a project he had been working on in his free time. With a few contributors and a lot of room to grow, the first uploaded version received moderate attention, clocking just under 1000 downloads but strong positive reactions from the player base. By the fourth version, the mod had over 10,000 hits and was making a name for itself within the Civ community.

Fall From Heaven is the story of Erebos, a fantasy world emerging from an ice age of apocalyptic proportions and heading for a toastier Armageddon in the meantime. It was a clever play on the concept of the Civilization games as the event of nomadic tribes becoming static; the races of Erebos are emerging to reclaim a thawing world. As the mod progressed, more and more features were added to make the world feel more full and dynamic, as well as give each faction a unique flavour. Eventually, in May of 2006, the first version of Fall From Heaven 2 was released, with complete dedicated art and writing teams. Various PC gaming publications started taking notice of the mod at this point. This article even went so far as to rank it 2nd in a list of 200 reasons to love PC gaming back in 2006, where it rubbed shoulders with such venerable slices of gaming history as Spore’s penis aliens and that sound that plays when you headshot someone in Counterstrike (which is totally rad).

The mod even inspired a number of “mod-mods” such as Fall Further (see what they did there?) and Orbis, which attempted to further explore the potential of the concept. Fall Further looked to expand – well – just about everything including adding more RPG elements to the game and, as the name might suggest, go deeper on just about every feature already existing in the mod. Orbis is pretty much at the opposite end of the spectrum; a mod based in the Fall From Heaven universe but heading in its own direction.

In December 2008, the final version of Fall From Heaven 2 was released, a full three years since the first version of Fall From Heaven 1. In its final version, the mod was truly a sight to behold and a joy to play. The magic system, which included a fireball spell that actually spawned a fireball that you could control like a missile in the base game, was full of innovative and creative abilities. The unit promotion system had been refined to feel more impacting on your units and give anyone the chance to be hero. The diplomacy system had even been enriched, with leaders liking you more for controlling wonders that they favored. Just writing about it makes me want to start up the game and jump into a map full of dangers and marvels to explore. Of course, the mod wasn’t perfect; the random nature of dungeon exploration results could bring your game to an untimely end (“A powerful enemy has arisen to defend the lair”? More like arisen to dick on my only city) or give you a super boost early on. These are still just minor gripes against what is otherwise a stellar project that adds to much to the base game.

A standalone Fall From Heaven game is announced but soon the project is put on ice thanks to problems of funding. By this time, Paxton had the attention of larger entities, not least of which was Stardock Games. In the meantime, the success and popularity of the Fall From Heaven 2 mod (which as of now has over half a million hits) led him to some level of prominence within Firaxis, where he was an external consultant. In 2010, Paxton joined the development team for Elemental: War of Magic after its release (which Stardock saw as a failure on their part). The project seemed perfect for him; the game was very similar to Fall From Heaven in a number of ways (not least its characteristics as a Civ-like strategy game with RPG elements and magic). Stardock held themselves so accountable for the failure that they decided to remake the game and give it to users who brought War of Magic for free. Paxton was assigned the Lead Development role; his dream of making videogames for a living was fast becoming a reality. In October 2012 the remake of War of Magic, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress, was finally released. The game received mostly positive reviews (though the general consensus was that the combat wasn’t very good). Following on from this, Paxton went on to lead design on the standalone expansion, Legendary Heroes, which was released in May 2013 to an even more positive reception thanks to the way that it addressed the few gripes that the community had with the base game. These twin successes established Paxton so well within Stardock that in September 2013 he was made Vice President of Stardock Entertainment and head of games development. Paxton’s addition to the company was praised by Brad Wardell, Stardock’s CEO, who said in the official press release that Paxton had “transformed the games studio”.

The story of Derek Paxton shows that dreams of working in the games industry are not so far-fetched and that they are achievable. You don’t necessarily have to go on one of those new-fangled games design university courses; you just have to be passionate, well networked and willing to take the opportunities that come your way. Start small with modding, work your way up to bigger projects and who knows? You might just be the next Derek “Kael” Paxton.

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