I found this extremely funny:
"Before even having a name, the company was criticized in the Grognardia blog for possibly not being Old School enough."
I wonder who at Grognardia thinks they are more old school industry professionals than these guys are?
That wasn't the complaint. You can see the Grognardia post
here.
In particular, James of Grognardia said: "Any definition of "Old School approach" that encompasses both
Savage Worlds and
Pathfinder is, I fear, so broad as to be meaningless", which referenced the original statement from Jim Ward when they were talking about the possibility of forming the company.
Jim Ward was also the man behind Fast Forward Entertainment, one of the true crash-and-burn stories of the d20 era, due to astonishingly bad product and little understanding of either the market or the OGL.
Of the four names forming the company, none of them have a good list of old-school design credits at TSR. James Ward has Metamorphosis Alpha and Gamma World, but little besides. Frank Mentzer is particularly notable for expanding the BX books to BECMI and for producing the "Red Box" Basic set, but I'm not particularly impressed by Needle, Egg of the Phoenix or his completion of the Temple of Elemental Evil. Tim Kask is... ahem... a design nonentity, who is particularly notable for his hatred of Dave Arneson. I'm not familiar with Chris Clark at all. (I'm not much the wiser after trying to research his previous products).
They may well be able to actually produce good product. I hope so.
Cheers!
