Dark Horse Comics is Breaking Into the Game Industry With New Studio

Long time comic book publisher Dark Horse Comics is officially establishing a foothold in the gaming industry. Introducing Dark Horse Games.

According to a report by VentureBeat, the comic company has unveiled their plans for a new gaming branch. Dubbed Dark Horse Games and led by Johnny Lee, this child company will manage their IPs, partner with existing studios, and even develop their own games based on the various comic book brands theyve published.

Dark Horse has been around since the mid 80s, and is best known for the Hellboy series. And while thats their star child, they plan on evaluating all of their IPs to see what would make the best games. At least thats what Lee told VentureBeat.

We have evergreen properties, like Hellboy, where there will always be interest in making games and doing collaborations.
. . .
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. I think most AAA devs that I've talked to prefer their game dev team to build core gameplay and then fit an IP to it, versus shoving an IP down their throats. We're sensitive to that.

This makes sense. Dark Horse had their finger on the gaming world for a while now, often publishing comic adaptions of popular video games. It's only naturally that they'd want to start sending content back the other way.

At this time, they dont have any specific games or ideas to promote. The obvious idea is Hellboy, but anything beyond that is pure speculation. Since the studio is starting small (only 10 employees), we dont expect a great deal of content out of them at first. Were sure more information will be available in due time, probably on their official website. Stay tuned.