Dark Horse Comics has announced a new gaming and digital division known as Dark Horse Games.
Announced in an interview with VentureBeat, Dark Horse Games will focus on bringing the publisher's first-party properties into the realm of gaming. It will also partner with as yet unnamed external developers to create third-party licensed games. According to a blog post, the new division's mission is "to bring joy and entertainment through Dark Horse Comics’ portfolio of over 425 story driven, diverse and unique worlds and characters, by bringing them to games."
Dark Horse Games is already in discussions with several of the "world’s top gaming companies" to begin development on titles that will focus on the brand's pre-existing library of characters and stories. While Dark Horse Comics is the home of well-known titles such as Hell Boy, Sin City and The Umbrella Academy, Dark Horse Games will mainly pull from "older and less established IPs" and focus on re-establishing them as gaming-first franchises.
"We have evergreen properties, like Hellboy, where there will always be interest in making games and doing collaborations,” said Johnny Lee, newly established general manager of Dark Horse Games. “We and our partners can really evaluate if a story IP and character universe would be a good fit for games that they’re internally designing and developing."
While Dark Horse Games places gaming as its core pillar of development, it will also develop other forms of multimedia to coincide with releases of its first-party titles. These will include, but won't be limited to, anime and webtoons.
Speaking to the process of establishing Dark Horse Games, Lee said "We right now have spent a lot of time on finding the right in-game collaborations at the triple-A level where the stories and the characters fit. We are in late-stage discussions with several of them. And so if those go well, you’ll see pretty big Dark Horse Comics characters in live triple-A games no later than the end of Q1 next year.”
Dark Horse Comics was established in 1986 and over the course of its 35-year lifespan has developed a wide range of popular franchises. While it has dabbled in adapting some of those properties to the big screen, this will be the publisher's first real attempt at breaking into the gaming industry. In 2008, the company licensed Hellboy: The Science of Evil to publisher Konami and developer Krome Studios but the game was critically panned and was considered a failure.
Source: VentureBeat, Dark Horse Games