Nordic Games has rebranded itself as THQ Nordic
Nordic Games first started out in Sweden in 2008 as a mini-venture to self-publish such illustrious titles as Dance Party Club Hits, Kart Racer and Truck Racer, among others on PS2 and Nintendo Wii.
The following year, Nordic published We Sing, a million-plus selling karaoke franchise for Nintendo Wii. In 2011, Nordic Games began its transformation from a small scale, two-platform games publisher to a multi-platform, multi-genre global player.
One could say the most defining moment for the company happened in 2013, grabbing headlines like: “Who the FUCK is Nordic Games?”, “Darksiders Gets Bought By… Nordic Games?” and “Nordic Games explains who the f they are, plans for THQ assets”. Up to that point, Nordic had been a low profile publisher uttering expletives of our own along the way, and all of a sudden they found themselves in the international gaming media spotlight.
Since the studio’s formation in 2008, 16 individual IP and franchise acquisitions were concluded, resulting in a catalogue of more than 250 actively sold games, over 60 trademarks, hundreds of web domains and a few patents for hardware and software.
61 game development projects were initiated and have launched, and most important, we have created 82 jobs (if you include external development teams, this number amounts to 325) and pride ourselves on our very, very low staff fluctuation, which basically amounts to zero.
Two development studios were set up – one located in Phoenix, Arizona, the other one in Munich, Germany, and their teams grew from two in 2007 to 84 team members today.
The newly rebranded studio said in a press release “While we take great pride in our Swedish roots and accomplished a great deal under the Nordic Games masthead, we decided it was time to incorporate the THQ name. Those key brands will continue to shape our business in a meaningful way going forward, and THQ Nordic represents a core approach of doing much more than “owning” a highly competitive portfolio of IP. We cherish them, and align them with the very best development resources to expand upon them with the level of experience that communities and established fan bases expect and deserve. Side note – another upside to this whole rebrand thing is we don’t get asked about the Nordic Games parties at Gamescom anymore – it was the other guys that threw them. With this rebrand we are entering the next phase in the company’s evolution.”
THQ Nordic currently has 23 game projects in development, 13 thereof have not yet been publicly announced but are sure to be in the next months. Needless to say, the majority of these projects are based on former THQ owned IPs and franchises.
As far as the logo design in concerned, Lars Wingefors, founder and owner of THQ Nordic (formerly known as Nordic Games) would like to say this:
“As for the new logo design, we literally stumbled across it when browsing some art files, after we bought the THQ trademark and figured, why not? We hope the reception from our partners is less ambivalent but we’re OK either way. We invite you to our Gamescom booth to play our games and see the logo in large-scale format.”
Those to attend Gamescom in Cologne will be able to visit THQ Nordic’s booth for a quick look at current projects and also some of our upcoming games:
THQ Nordic at Gamescom 2016:
Entertainment area: Hall 8, C20
Business area: Hall 4.1, D21
