Cryptic vets form Cold Iron

A trio of Cryptic Studios veterans have struck out on their own, today announcing the formation of their new studio, Cold Iron. Based in San Jose and originally established a little over a year ago, Cold Iron describes itself as a fully funded AAA development studio looking to make online action games.

The studio was co-founded by CEO Craig Zinkievich, CTO Shannon Posniewski, and creative director Matt Highison. Zinkeievich was COO at Cryptic, where he worked for a dozen years on City of Heroes, Star Trek Online, and Neverwinter. Posniewski also spent about a dozen years at Cryptic as a programmer and executive producer, working on those games as well as City of Villains, Champions Online, and the cancelled Marvel Universe Online. Highison's roots with Cryptic don't go back quite as far, with the developer joining in 2007, working as an artist on many of the same titles, as well as serving as art director on an unannounced project at the time of his departure in November 2015.

"We couldn't be more excited to finally introduce the world to Cold Iron," Zinkievich said. "We decided to start this studio last year with exactly one goal in mind: to create compelling games that we wanted to play absolutely all the time. To do that, we put together a pitch, built a great prototype, got fully-funded, and are now building an unstoppable team. We're working hard on a AAA online action game that is literally out of this world, and we cannot wait to share it with you."

The company's first project is an original sci-fi game being developed for consoles and PC using Unreal Engine 4.