Dark Insiders Gunfire Games

- Chris Burke

Late June is bringing humidity and baking sunshine to the Lone Star State, and it’s hotter than hell outside. But comfortably airconditioned within Gunfire Games’ Austin, Texas studio, oxm is battling hell’s own creatures as Fury, the third of the Horsemen – actually a horsewoman, of course – in a lengthy hands-on session with Xbox One’s first proper Darksiders game.

On the wall of Gunfire Games’ studio hangs an impressive replica of War’s gigantic sword from the first Darksiders, while a statuette of the Joe Mad-inspired Death from Darksiders II sits on the reception area’s coffee table, next to a copy of oxm from last year featuring Fury on its cover. They are proud reminders of both the series’ legacy and its developers’ exciting present, following a phoenix-like rise from the ashes of the now defunct Vigil Games. That Darksiders III is being made at all is testament to both the developers’ grit and the cult popularity of the franchise.

Vigil Games was formed in Austin in 2005 by David Adams and Joe Madureira, a comic book writer and artist who had worked on Marvel’s Uncanny X-Men series, and whose style informed Darksiders’ distinct design aesthetic. But after Vigil’s parent company THQ went bankrupt in 2012, Adams plus John Pearl, now Gunfire’s Design Director, took a handful of other erstwhile Vigil staff and formed their own studio in 2014. Initially the team developed games for VR headsets, including Cronos and Herobound, and remastered Darksiders II – as The Deathinitive Edition – for Xbox One. But they were not done with the Darksiders series. With THQ Nordic’s backing, they could now return to the concept of Darksiders III that they had already been discussing before Vigil closed. And so Fury was born, or rather reborn.