BattleTech - About the Development

Behind BattleTech, the hefty mech tactics game from the creators of Shadowrun

Shams Jorjani is no stranger to signing big projects. As Paradox’s vice president of business development, he’s been intimately involved in the deals that birthed Cities: Skylines and Pillars of Eternity. But, for the first time, he was starting to feel the pressure.

“Shams,” his colleagues told him. “You can’t fuck this up.”



Due to what Jorjani was working on, a name was spreading around Paradox’s Stockholm offices, murmured in reverence: Jordan Weisman. In the ‘80s, when many of Jorjani’s workmates cut their teeth, Weisman had created the Shadowrun and MechWarrior tabletop RPGs. And in recent years, he’d founded Harebrained Schemes: the studio behind Shadowrun Returns and its excellent, literary sequels. Now he was on the phone talking to Jorjani about publishing a wonderfully chunky turn-based tactics MechWarrior adaptation, named BattleTech.

If you trace many of the PC’s most beloved games back to the beginning, you’ll find roots and rulesets in pen and paper gaming. But it’s highly unusual for a tabletop designer to be so involved in ushering their creations into the digital realm. “My career, unlike a lot of tabletop guys, has been pretty split,” says Weisman, by way of explanation. “Half of tabletop, half of digital.”

He’s reflecting on his history among the Romanesque rafters of Gamla Riksarkivet, the Swedish national archives. Jorjani, who didn’t fuck it up, sits in an adjacent room giving another interview.

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Nephologist said:

Pretty sure it's the other way around and Mechwarrior is an adaptation of Battletech.

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