The Death of a Statesman
by Matt "Positron" Miller
Killing Statesman off in the world of City of Heroes was never something we took lightly. Veterans of the game know that the character was the namesake of Jack Emmert, who was the lead designer who originally launched City of Heroes in 2004. Jack posted as Statesman in the forums, came up with his backstory, and was instrumental in the character becoming the original poster-boy for the game's marketing. Killing off the character meant a lot of things to a lot of people, but for me it was the ultimate declaration that City of Heroes has grown up and left the nest from which it was born.
Many players thought we would "do the deed" when Paragon Studios was formed and Cryptic ended its relationship with the title to work on other endeavors. It seemed simple, to kill off the character and remove them from the game, but it was anything but. Statesman, as I previously said, was the poster-boy, the guy-on-the-box, and mentioned all over the place in the game lore. He was an enemy in villain missions, an ally in hero ones, an objective in others, and even handed out his own chunk of content in the Statesman Task Force. When Paragon was first founded, we discussed the idea of a story of killing off Statesman, but ultimately decided that the timing wasn't right.
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