{"id":1701247,"date":"2026-09-25T19:26:01","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T19:26:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wnhpRCyRibfsbVJodz4UkB"},"modified":"2026-09-25T19:26:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-25T19:26:01","slug":"for-warhorses-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","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/arcader.org\/news\/for-warhorses-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\/","title":{"rendered":"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"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Martin Kl\u00edma is an iconoclast. As the co-founder of Warhorse Studios, he’s responsible for one of the crunchiest, most peculiar, and best RPGs<\/a> of the last decade\u2014Kingdom 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2014the eternally fractious Daniel V\u00e1vra\u2014were two disaffected devs striking out on their own. But Kl\u00edma’s career did not begin with the incorporation of Warhorse Studios. It began in the actually existing socialism<\/a> of Czechoslovakia, in the 1980s.<\/p>\n

History check<\/h2>\n

“I was learning English at school, but it was sort of difficult,” recalls Kl\u00edma. 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 Kl\u00edma 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.”<\/p>\n

What Kl\u00edma 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, Kl\u00edma 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.”<\/p>\n

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