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Vigil: New project was going to "blow people away"

Lead combat designer expresses frustration at Darksiders studio failing to find a buyer

The lead combat designer for Vigil Games has taken to the Neogaf forums to express his frustration at the Darkisders studio failing to find a buyer at the auction of THQ's assets.

While Relic, Volition, THQ Montreal and a number of IP found new homes, Vigil Games and Darksiders was left on the table. According to Cureton, who previously worked for Day 1 Studios and Namco America, Vigil had been working on a new project, codenamed "Crawler", for several months.

"I knew, without a shadow of [a] doubt, that the project we were working on was going to blow people away," he wrote in his post. "In fact, it did blow people away. We did, in two months, what many companies haven't done in a year. The pride of knowing that no one was doing anything like us was so satisfying.

"So maybe you can imagine what it feels like when you read the list of who bought what only to discover your name is not on the list. Why? Did we do something wrong? Were we not good enough? Were we not worth 'anything?' Imagine that."

Since the close of the THQ auction, Atsushi Inaba, the executive director of Japanese studio Platinum Games, has expressed interest in buying the rights to the Darksiders franchise, "on the cheap." However, this will be cold comfort for Cureton and his fellow employees at Vigil, as any IP acquisition would still result in the dissolution of the studio.

"I've been in this industry for 20 years," he added. "I've been laid off more than once. It sucks every time. But am I sad I don't have a job? Not really. I'm sure I'll get another one eventually. I'm sad because it won't be this job.

"It won't be at Vigil. That's why I'm sad. The people I waged war with are no longer together. The people that I bled with, vented with, argued with, and kicked back with... these people will never be together again in the same combination."

Vigil's last game, Darksiders 2, was released in 2012. Despite selling more than a million units in its first month on sale, analysts believe it struggled to reach its "break-even point" of 2 million sales.

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Matthew Handrahan

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Matthew Handrahan joined GamesIndustry in 2011, bringing long-form feature-writing experience to the team as well as a deep understanding of the video game development business. He previously spent more than five years at award-winning magazine gamesTM.

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