Vigil Games

Vigil Games was a game development studio based in Austin, Texas (USA). It was founded by comic artist Joe Madureira, David Adams, Marvin Donald and Ryan Stefanelli in 2005. The company was acquired by THQ Inc. in 2006.

Vigil's first release was the action hack-and-slash game Darksiders (2010). The sequel Darksiders II was released in 2012. The studio also contributed to Homefront (2011).

In December 2012 parent company THQ filed for Chapter 11. All of its studios and assets were up for sale, but Vigil was the only one that was not picked up and closed down when the auction ended on 22nd January 2013. Before its closure the studio had been working on Warhammer 40,000: Dark Millennium. Originally revealed in 2007, it was confirmed afterwards that development had been halted in March 2012. In a goodbye message on the website NeoGAF lead combat designer Ben Cureton revealed that the studio had been working on a project codenamed Crawler.

Following the closure, Atsushi Inaba, producer at Platinum Games, expressed an interest in acquiring the Darksiders franchise. On 28th January 2013 Crytek GmbH announced to open the new studio Crytek USA Corp., headed by Vigil co-founder David Adams and 35 Vigil developers, making it the spiritual continuation of Vigil, but without taking along the Darksiders franchise. When Crytek USA was downscaled at the end of July 2014 and its project HUNT: Horrors of the Gilded Age was moved to the Crytek Frankfurt studio, Adams quit and took along a core group of former Vigil Games developers to establish the independent studio Gunfire Games.