Cryo Studios

Cryo Studios North America was a video game design studio based in Portland, Oregon, USA, and was a subsidiary of France's now-defunct Cryo Interactive.

History

Cryo Studios was originally founded as Dark Horse Interactive (DHI) in the late 1990s, a joint venture of Cryo Interactive and Dark Horse Comics, and based in Dark Horse's headquarters in Milwaukie, Oregon. In 1999, Cryo Interactive bought out Dark Horse's share of DHI and renamed it Cryo Studios, relocating their offices to the central eastside industrial district of Portland.

Cryo Studios existed entirely as Cryo Interactive's American subsidiary, producing games based on licensed properties. Their first license (as DHI) was based on MTV's animated science fiction series Aeon Flux, though this product never made it past the early design stage before the license agreement was terminated. Shortly afterwards, DHI was granted the license to develop an interactive game based on Dark Horse's own comic book series, Hellboy, written and drawn by Mike Mignola.

The Windows version of this game was completed in 2000 after nearly four years of production; the intended PlayStation version of this game was put on ice. Their next project was to be based on Universal Studios' "Monsters," which included Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Wolf Man. However, before any project made it out of pre-production, Cryo Interactive — quickly succumbing to the worldwide recession of 2001 — closed their North American branch. Cryo Interactive filed for bankruptcy a year later.

In 2004, Canada-based Dreamcatcher Interactive — a former subsidiary of Cryo Interactive — finished development on and released the PlayStation version of Cryo Studio's Hellboy: Asylum Seeker in time for the theatrical release of the Hellboy movie, though the two are unrelated.

Game titles

• Aeon Flux (canceled in pre-production)
• Hellboy: Dogs of the Night (2000)
• Universal Monsters' Dracula (canceled in pre-production)

External links

• Dark Horse Comics
• Dreamcatcher Interactive
• The official Hellboy Game website