Romantic Developments
First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the action-RPG
By Chris Plante
In 2005, Armağan and İpek Yavuz created TaleWorlds, an independent development house in Turkey. Their first game, Mount & Blade, was released three years later. A sandbox action-RPG set in the medieval era, the game eschewed the fantasy trappings often hot-glued onto similar titles for an emphasis on realism and melee combat.
The game was a critical and commercial success, with one expansion, Warband, released in 2010, and another scheduled for this year. Armağan and İpek, it seemed, had defied the odds. They created a new intellectual property in a country without a games industry, on an almost nonexistent budget, with minimal experience in the field—and they did all of this together, as a couple.
