Want to work at Cryptic Studios, makers of City of Heroes and City of Villains, as well as the upcoming Champions Online and Star Trek Online games?
A friend at Cryptic has passed on two job openings that recently opened up in his part of the company. They are:
Graphic Designer

• You’ll be tasked with making visuals for their web sites and corporate communications
• You’ll need a strong background in web design, both in skills and theory

Web Programmer

• You’ll be developing social, community, and ecommerce tools to support Cryptic’s games
• You’ll need skills and experience in developing large web sites

You also need to be willing to move, if you don’t already live in Northern California. Cryptic is in Los Gatos, which has the benefit of being just twelve miles from Superstars in San Jose, also known as the ChannelFireball.com home base.
If you’re interested in either job, click through on the appropriate link and you’ll find all the info you need to apply.

Following the spiraling death of Upper Deck Entertainment, the WoW TCG was ever-so-briefly in doubt, but has now been picked up by Cryptozoic Entertainment. Cryptozoic is effectively a spin-off of Blizzard, helmed by Cory Jones, formerly the Blizzard liaison with UDE for the WoW TCG. We have to imagine that after the debacle of UDE’s recent crazy time, Blizzard is no longer interested in putting its IP into the hands of genuinely independent entities.
Would you like to work on the WoW TCG, or just work for the company that holds the license?
Check out Cryptozoic’s careers page, which currently has openings for a host of jobs ranging from production through organized play and game design.

NECA announced earlier this week that it has acquired most of the Wizkids properties from Topps, following in the wake of Wizkids folding last year or so.
Note that I said “most,” as NECA gets HeroClix, ActionClix (the Halo and Aliens branding), HorrorClix, SportsClix, MageKnight, and Pocketmodel Games…but not Mechwarrior, which is the only Wizkids game I played.
This is not tremendously surprising, as Jordan Weisman has kept a firm grip on the Battletech property ever since he realized that generating your own IP was superior to licensing it from someone else (I have some very old FASA catalogs featuring early Battletech products side-by-side with Star Trek, Doctor Who, He-Man, and Top Gun games). Battletech has clearly had tremendous legs as a property, continuing to spawn successful video games and numerous incarnations including board games, collectible card games, collectible miniature games, and Virtual World, which in turn helped spawn Game Empire, which gave us Magic hall of famer Alan Comer.
You can still get into the original Battletech board game here.
It does mean that we may see more Clix games, which may be good for Clix fans (assuming the resurrected product line is compatible with the old stuff). In the meantime, I’ll hold onto my Republic, Ghost Bear, Jade Falcon, Banson’s Raiders, and Nova Cat forces. They’re still cool little toys.