Company of Heroes Devs Form Smoking Gun Interactive

Relic is one of the few veteran studios who managed to keep their games above a fairly high standard of quality, so we take no joy in seeing them lose developers. Especially when these are people who worked on last year's best rated strategy title, Company of Heroes, including the game's producer John Johnson. Together with another couple of ex-Relic members - namely lead programmer Drew Dunlop and art director Angie Radwan-Pytlewski - they formed a new development studio called Smoking Gun Interactive, and today they announced its grand opening to the gaming world.

Joining the new studio's founding members are two more former Relic employees who worked on the Company of Heroes project (audio director Crispin Hands and story & script writer Duane Pye), making this a pretty solid, albeit still small start-up team. Needless to say, they're looking for more people to join them on their website. And by the way, they're located in Vancouver, Canada.

Although they have yet to announce any solid plans (i.e. games), they claim that Smoking Gun "will focus on creating innovative award winning cross platform games based on original or company owned intellectual property". Judging by their past experience at Relic - and by last week's Exoriare.com teaser / puzzle, odds are their first project will be a strategy game.

We'll be waiting to hear more from them, as we always are from the Relic front.

(N.B. Archive text, links removed)