How Saber got so big

Part 2 of my private jet interview with Saber CEO Matt Karch... covering the fine print of Halo deals, the advantages of speaking Russian and the benefits of hanging out with Shaq

Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. Screenshot: Saber Interactive, Microsoft

Somewhere over Colorado or thereabouts, as we flew on his private plane in mid-December, the CEO of Saber Interactive paused from telling me his history of the gaming company he’s run for the past two decades.

Noticing a pattern in the anecdotes he was conveying, Matt Karch acknowledged that, yes, in those early years, when Saber was a scrappy start-up, many of its dealings with game publishers and would-be partners were pretty negative.

So, Karch invoked the name of Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games. Epic started as an independent shop like Karch’s, long before the Fortnite-maker was spending $1 billion or so to fight Apple, Google and other allegedly monopolistic tech giants.

“If you ever want to know why Tim Sweeney fights the good fight that he fights, against who he considers to be the powers that be, it's because independent developers have chips on their shoulders that are, you know, often bigger than other parts of their body. And it's all because we've been taken advantage of.”

And then we returned to his chronology, which had covered Saber’s rough early years and still had some colorful anecdotes ahead about Halo and a cancelled game about Donald Trump.

But to get to that, it’s best to start at the beginning of my 2 ½ interview with Karch, which began as we passed over the Rockies, during our flight from California to New Jersey. (If you want to know how I wound up on Karch’s plane, please read this).

Karch had settled into a seat across from me, near the rear of the 10-seater Gulfstream 280. Across the aisle sat a Saber PR rep and, one more seat up, Saber’s chief composer, who was working on a game soundtrack on his laptop.

As we started, Karch noticed crumbs near my window and apologized. No need, I said, those were probably from the muffin I’d grabbed en route to the flight. I’d only realized last minute that there would be no meal service on a private flight.

Karch has a short resume, having spent most of his adult life running Saber. Before that, he’d been a lawyer and before that, back in the early 1990s, he was pursuing a master’s in Russian.

“I was doing that primarily for language proficiency skills,” he told me.

Why the interest in Russia?

“I was fascinated by the fact that, at least growing up, they were the enemy,” he said. “Know your enemy, I guess.”