Vigil Games

» see vigilgames.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Vigil Games opened in Austin, Texas in 2005. David Adams came out of NCsoft's Austin operation and Joe Madureira came out of comics, where he had drawn Uncanny X-Men for Marvel through the mid-90s before starting Battle Chasers on his own. THQ bought the studio in 2006, a year after it opened and four years before it shipped anything.

Darksiders arrived in January 2010. It was an action game built on a Zelda skeleton, locked dungeons with a key item in each one, bolted to a combat system lifted openly from God of War. Madureira's art carried the rest. Reviewers liked it more than they expected to. It sold well enough for a sequel, and Darksiders II shipped in August 2012 with a much larger map and a loot system nobody had asked for.

THQ was already going under by then. The uDraw tablet had cost the company a hundred million dollars in writedowns, and the publisher spent late 2012 selling its own back catalog at whatever price people felt like paying. The Humble THQ Bundle went up on 29 November 2012 with Darksiders in it. Twenty days later THQ filed Chapter 11.

The asset sale closed on 23 January 2013 and the studios went in lots. Relic went to Sega and Volition went to Koch Media. The South Park project already deep in development at Obsidian went to Ubisoft. Vigil was listed with the rest and nobody raised a hand, so it closed the same day.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ two games in eight years ~

Eight years and two shipped titles is a thin record for a studio that size, and it is most of the explanation for what happened in the sale. Darksiders took five years. Darksiders II took two and a half more. A buyer reading the lot in January 2013 saw a team that had just emptied itself out on a sequel and would need another two or three years of payroll before it produced anything sellable.

The bundle is the part worth sitting with. On 29 November 2012 you could pay a dollar and get Darksiders along with four other THQ games, which is how a fair number of people here first played it. Steam was the only reasonable way to buy PC games in Turkey by then, boxed copies having mostly gone from the shelves, and a bundle on top of regional pricing meant a game that launched at sixty dollars in the US was effectively free. The money went to THQ and to charity. It did not go to Vigil, and three weeks later there was no THQ left to send it to.

~ the room where it did not sell ~

Vigil was the only THQ development studio that failed to sell. Jason Rubin had come in as THQ's president in May 2012 to try to steer the company out of trouble and was the one running the pitch to buyers. In a Game Informer interview published the day after the auction he was direct about it: "I failed to find Vigil a home." He then laid out the problem as the buyers had seen it. Vigil had just finished a game, so it sat farther from its next release than any other team in the sale, and what it was building was an unannounced original property.

That project was codenamed Crawler. Adams had said publicly that it made jaw-dropping progress in two months and Rubin had called the idea fantastic. An unproven IP from a team with no near-term revenue is exactly the shape of asset a distressed buyer declines, and the enthusiasm of the people selling it does not change the arithmetic.

~ where everybody went ~

Crytek announced a new Austin studio five days after the closure and took a large part of the team, with Adams running it. That lasted until 2014, when Crytek's own money trouble caught up and the Austin office was cut loose, so Adams founded Gunfire Games instead. Madureira started Airship Syndicate in 2015. Nordic Games had bought the leftover THQ catalog in 2013 with Darksiders in it and renamed itself THQ Nordic in 2016, and both halves of the old studio ended up back on the series for its new Swedish owner: Gunfire built Darksiders III in 2018 and Airship built Darksiders Genesis in 2019. Every part of Vigil survived except Vigil.

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