It happens all the time - a developmet house completes a major project, and then a substantial portion of the ‘creative’ picks up and leaves shop. This is usually a good thing for gamers — in most cases the creative folks continue to call the shots in their new companies instead of wallowing in mediocrity under the reign of the publisher’s marketing guys at their old ones.

www.thinkwild.net has a blog entry from Red 5 Studios‘ founder Mark Kern which details his personal history of game development. Here is his inspirational part while relfecting on the formation of R5S:

When I decided to leave Blizzard last April, it was one of the hardest things I ever did. I left pretty quietly, and avoided speaking with teammates and friends for a long time while I just…decompressed.

I did some soul searching then, and almost left the industry. But after awhile I realized that I still wanted to make great games, and build great teams. The WoW team was the best team I had ever worked with, but we made some mistakes, and I wanted to do better. I wanted to create a dynamic, team-oriented environment where creative people could thrive. For certain reasons, this was not possible at Blizzard in quite the way I wanted, so I decided it was time to build my own company to work on the games in my head and in the creative manner I envisioned.

A few months later I founded Red 5 Studios with some amazingly talented former colleagues from Bliz, and off we went. You can follow our exploits at Red 5 Studios’ website. This story is just beginning…

So keep an eye on Red 5 Studios. We’ll probably hear some sweet MMORPG news from their way in a few years. And after what they’ve done for WoW, how could we not get excited?