Ten days, ago, Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast announced an exclusive publishing agreement with Giant Skull, the game studio started by Star Wars Jedi: Survivor game leader Stig Asmussen.
They announced that Asmussen’s studio is working on a new single-player action adventure title set in the world of Dungeons & Dragons.
I had a chance to talk with the company leaders about the deal. At the Summer Game Fest Play Days, I sat down with John Hight, President of Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming at Hasbro; and Asmussen, who is the CEO of Giant Skull and a former leader at Respawn.
This certainly sounds like a big effort, as it will be an original title. It’s a single-player action-adventure title set in the world of Dungeons & Dragons and “marks a definitive moment in both companies’ gaming ambitions.”
The game is currently in development for PC and console and more details will be revealed at a later date. Hight himself is a new executive in charge of the Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons game and game licensing business at Hasbro, as he has been on the job for less than a year. He was previously senior vice president and general manager of the Warcraft franchise at Blizzard Entertainment, where he oversaw all development and commercial activities for World of Warcraft, Hearthstone, and Warcraft Rumble.
During his 12-year tenure at Blizzard, John directed development efforts for multiple World of Warcraft expansions, including Diablo III: Reaper of Souls, and Diablo III on console. Prior to Blizzard, Hight worked on over 30 games on various platforms, including critically acclaimed games in the Command & Conquer, Neverwinter Nights, and God of War franchises.
John Hight of Wizzards of the Coast and Stig Asmussen (right) of Giant Skull.
“It’s been not quite a year stepping into Wizards of the Coast. It’s been incredible. I knew coming into it that the goal is to build a digital publishing division,” Hight said in our interview. “We already had some games underway, but we wanted our goal is essentially to have a couple of premium games a year that we’re releasing as part of the Wizards label. So it was fun, and one of the first calls I made after getting the job was to Stig stick because if you want to build one of the best games out there, you talk to one of the best developers.”
Asmussen was most recently the game director of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order for Respawn Entertainment, a division of Electronic Arts. Prior to that, he was the game director on God of War III and the art director for God of War II at Sony Santa Monica. Giant Skull has an elite team, all of whom will be instrumental in shaping this new single-player focused action adventure, utilizing Unreal Engine 5, from the ground-up.
Asmussen said, “We opened up Giant Skull in September 2023, and a year later, John calls me up. He said, ‘Hey, I’m at Wizards now.’ We had been talking throughout that time. When I was thinking about starting a new company, John and I were talking a lot like talking about different ideas and how that could work out. I was picking his brain. when he reached out, and he came out to Encino to see the game and what we had been working on, he got to see our vertical slice.”
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