Laid off Doom devs have formed their own studio to make a new shooter

Detailed summary

We count at least eight horses (Hidden Horses) While id Software is reportedly trucking along with a new Doom title, a group of former employees have announced a new studio and…

While id Software is reportedly trucking along with a new Doom title, a group of former employees have announced a new studio and Kickstarter campaign for their first game.

As awful as Xbox’s July layoffs were as a whole, the impact on Doom studio id Software was especially shocking. Considering it’s one of the oldest developers in the business, and helped create the first person shooter genre, losing so many employees was nothing short of cultural vandalism.

That isn’t even getting into the fact that the layoffs came the same day as the excellent Doom: The Dark Ages | Revelation DLC expansion was released, with most of the people who worked on it immediately put out of work.

While it’s hard to feel optimistic about the future of id Software itself, a group of those laid off employees have banded together to set up a new studio of their own and they already have a first person shooter in development.

The studio is called Hidden Horses (not to be confused with Manor Lords publisher Hooded Horse) and is comprised of over 20 former id Software employees.

It’s billed as being completely employee owned and the goal is to keep making ‘some of the best single-player first person shooters in the genre.’ Some of its members include producer Davis Scherer, UI programmer Jeffrey Listman, and tools programmer Johnmichael Quinlin.

As for the studio’s first game, it’s dubbed Danger Pay and will no doubt play similarly to id’s work on the Doom games. Rather than demons from Hell, though, the main threat is a sinister AI game show host, with the project set to take inspiration from the original The Running Man movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and arcade shooter Smash T.V.

However, Hidden Horses needs funding and so it’s turning to Kickstarter. Its campaign hasn’t gone live yet and currently lacks a launch date beyond ‘soon’, but the team sounds confident that ‘the community is eager for more of the type of game we make, not less.’

A post published to Kickstarter reads, ‘We are seeking…

Opening of the article, excerpted from Metro. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.