“There were rats in that building and human poop on the doorstep the first day we went to take possession as it were – and I use that term in the broadest possible sense.

“It was three of us in a room, in another studio that they were letting us borrow,” recalls Bourassa.

And, though the project has now surpassed 5 million copies sold, and its hotly anticipated sequel recently entered Early Access on Epic, the first step to getting there wasn’t what anyone would call glamorous. When asked about how they envisioned the future when they started their Vancouver-based company in 2013, Red Hook Studios co-founders Chris Bourassa and Tyler Sigman answered almost in unison: “We didn’t.” The duo left their previous employers behind to launch the Lovecraft-inspired studio, but, as Sigman explains, “it was always about the game, it was never about the company.” The game he’s referring to is Darkest Dungeon, a gothic, dungeon-crawling RPG where your party’s mental status is just as vital as their physical one.

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