X-Wing 2E senior dev Max Brooke leaves Fantasy Flight Games after nine years
Known for work on Star Wars games and Legend of the Five Rings RPG.
X-Wing 2E co-designer Max Brooke broke the news on Twitter yesterday that he officially left Fantasy Flight Games on November 17th.
Brooke (pictured, right) worked for the publisher, which publishes popular titles such as Arkham Horror and Twilight Imperium, for nine years, during which he also co-developed the Star Wars RPG and was lead mechanics designer on the rebooted Legend of the Five Rings RPG. Before that, Brooke wrote on several Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay sourcebooks, including Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader.
Most recently, Brooke spent five years as a designer for the Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game. According to his personal website, he worked on the team of Fantasy Flight Games employees who, in 2018, relaunched the title in its current second edition format. Brooke then spent the rest of his time at the company as X-Wing’s senior developer, “setting vision and maintaining competitive balance”.
Brooke wished the other X-Wing designers well in the announcement tweet, referencing their shift to Atomic Mass Games. As Dicebreaker reported last month, the publisher was given the responsibility of publishing future releases for the popular competitive miniatures game by its parent company Asmodee. Atomic Mass Games currently develops the Marvel Crisis Protocol miniatures game. For its part, Fantasy Flight Games said it has other plans using the Star Wars licence in the works.
In a thread, Brooke said his split with Fantasy Flight does not signal the end to his time as a designer or writer. “Spoilers: I'm going to be writing about games, writing games, and writing about writing games,” he said. His website has a section where Brookes will be uploading free-to-download, “for-fun projects” that he claims don’t exactly work as sellable products.