Martin Klíma is an iconoclast. As the co-founder of Warhorse Studios, he's responsible for one of the crunchiest, most peculiar, and best RPGs of the last decade—Kingdom 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.

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—the eternally fractious Daniel Vávra—were two disaffected devs striking out on their own. But Klíma's career did not begin with the incorporation of Warhorse Studios. It began in the actually existing socialism of Czechoslovakia, in the 1980s.

"I was learning English at school, but it was sort of difficult," recalls Klíma. 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 Klíma 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."

What Klíma 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.

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