Since I knew these folks when they worked for Origin, I am pretty sure about the vetting.
Roberts was the boss at Digital Anvil for four years, and spent a lot of money, producing a big flat nothing. It took Microsoft nearly three years to finish that game in some releaseable form, and it was already a year and a half late upon the buyout.
His helming of the Wing Commander series is not the sign of greatness that some presume. Roberts had teams of very competent people to support him, and folks who could draw the line at some of his more vainglorious ideas. IIRC Warren Spector was brought in as a co-producer in the first WC to get it out the door after numerous Roberts-induced delays. It was also reported to me that once the cut scenes were introduced to the series, Roberts spent most of his producer-time shooting those. Etc.
As far as his personality, there's a pretty striking uniformity of opinion about him from the folks I have talked to. While other major players from the Origin era have a range of opinion about them, Roberts is uniformly negative. Even before the SC kickoff I knew of Roberts as the second most disliked guy at the company. It just took questions about the Kickstarter to discover why.
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