Author: John Scalzo

No, that’s not a typo. Welcome to the Weekly Warp-Up, your weekly wrap-up of the biggest and the best articles posted at Warp Zoned this week…

It’s hard to witness the demise of one video game company while another lays out a two-year plan for their latest console.

As of this week, THQ is no more. The popular publisher finally ran out of greenback gas as their internal studios and many of their biggest franchises were auctioned off to the highest bidder this week. The results were more than a little surprising. Crytek paid a pittance for the rights to Homefront (the team was already developing Homefront 2) while Sega spent big to obtain Relic Entertainment and Company of Heroes 2. But the two biggest surprises have to be mid-range publisher Deep Silver’s acquisition of Volition (and Saints Row 4) and Metro: Last Light and no one’s interest in Vigil (and Darksiders). THQ closed their office doors for good on Friday.

While this tragedy was unfolding, Nintendo was riding high off a bonanza of new Nintendo Direct announcements. The consolemaker mapped out the Wii U’s future in amazingly frank detail, announcing a new 3D Mario game, Mario Kart Wii U, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD, Super Smash Bros. 4‘s E3 debut, Monolith Soft’s next RPG, a radically reconstituted new Zelda game, Yoshi’s Epic Yarn, and Shin Megami Tensei X Fire Emblem. Did they even bother to save any surprises for E3?

Oh, and before all of this happened, Atari filed for bankruptcy. Again.

There’s more news after the break, but I’m already exhausted. (more…)

The clock has officially run out on THQ (and by extension, Vigil Games). With the publisher’s assets auctioned off to the highest bidder, executives distributed a memo to all employees yesterday effectively shutting down the company. A small number of employees will continue to work for THQ to aid the transition of assets to their new owners and employees to their bosses.

While Vigil went unsold during Tuesday’s auction, the developer (and the rights to the Darksiders franchise) may have a new owner soon. Atsushi Inaba, a producer at Platinum Games, has tweeted that he’d love to add Vigil to the Platinum family:

“In THQ’s studio and IP selling off auction, Darksiders is unsold? [We] wanna buy it…on the cheap…”

It’s important to note that this isn’t a formal offer to buy the studio (or even an informal one), but the Darksiders series has a lot of fans that would love to see Vigil continue their work.

[Sources: IGN, Kotaku]