With one of the biggest video game publishers of this generation closing down yesterday, it fortunately didn’t mean that most of the franchises and studios that THQ owned were going to close down as well, which meant that some people got to hold on to their jobs. Unfortunately, not everyone was lucky with the fact that Vigil Games, the development studio behind the Darksiders franchise, was not bought by any company. This essentially means that the franchise is left hanging in the balance and even sadder, the employees over at Vigil Games are now needing to find new jobs in a struggling economy.

In a rather sad post at gaming forum NeoGAF, Ben Cureton, the lead combat designer at Vigil Games, expressed his goodbyes to the company and to the gaming community as an employee of Vigil Games, in which he explains his feelings about the company closing down. I definitely do recommend for anyone, gamer or not, to give it a thorough read. You get the sense that Cureton really loved his job at Vigil Games and he even states that rather than being sad over not having a job, he is “sad because it won’t be THIS job. It won’t be at Vigil. That’s why I’m sad”. He ends the letter stating, “In closing, I can only say thank you to the fans of Vigil games. Your support means more than you can imagine. Your feedback (both positive and negative) gave us long-lasting insight that we will all take with us, wherever we may go. You are the reason we made Darksiders 1 &2… and you are the reason we will continue to make games”.

Vigil Games was a fairly new studio, having been founded in 2005, that I felt really proved themselves to have a promising future with the decent success that the Darksiders games had. They were even working on a new IP called ‘Crawler’, which THQ president Jason Rubin stated in an interview with Game Informer, that it “dropped the most jaws. It is a fantastic idea, and truly unique”. In more heartening news though, Platinum Games has already expressed interest in buying the Darksiders franchise which may mean that we’ll see a Darksiders 3 in the future.

As for Ben Cureton and the rest of the employees at Vigil Games, my condolences go out to them and I wish them the best. Thank you Vigil Games for everything you gave to us gamers!

Source: NeoGAF, Game Informer