Warhorse co-founder Martin Klíma on 15 years of the studio, grown-up RPGs, and helping topple communism

Warhorse Studios is turning 15, and co-founder Martin Klíma sat down to reflect on a career that started long before Kingdom Come: Deliverance — back in 1980s Czechoslovakia, where learning English, smuggling fantasy novels, and organising student protests were all part of the same story.

Klíma's path into games runs through JRR Tolkien. Unable to read The Lord of the Rings in Czech — only The Hobbit had been officially published — he tracked down an imported English copy around 1987 and taught himself the language well enough to get through it. That same drive led him to a smuggled Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, which he and his then-girlfriend (now wife) began translating, with plans to distribute it through Czechoslovakia's underground samizdat presses. The D&D group he ran was also, quietly, a cell of Stuha — an independent student union he was helping organise at the University of Prague. A petition against campus demolitions got him flagged by the government as a borderline rebel. Events escalated from there, and Klíma ended up playing a real role in the Velvet Revolution that brought down the communist regime in 1989.

Warhorse was founded in 2011 by Klíma and the famously outspoken Daniel Vávra, both veterans of the Czech games industry. The studio spent years in difficult development on Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a historically grounded RPG set in medieval Bohemia that deliberately avoided fantasy tropes — no magic, no elves, no chosen-one nonsense. It found a devoted audience hungry for exactly that kind of "grown-up" RPG, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 continued that tradition, landing as one of the most acclaimed RPGs of recent years. Klíma describes the 15-year journey as feeling like yesterday, which is either a sign of how fast it went or how much happened.

In the interview Klíma also touches on broader industry topics: the demand for more mature, systems-heavy RPGs, his views on AI in game development, and his belief that games are simply priced too cheaply for the work that goes into them — a position that will resonate with some developers and irritate plenty of players. At 15, Warhorse is still a studio defined by its founders' stubbornness, and that doesn't appear to be changing.