Tony Hawk, Crash Bandicoot Studio Joins Blizzard

Vicarious Visions, which in recent years has been most well-known for its work on the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and Crash Bandicoot franchises, has today been announced to be merging into Blizzard Entertainment. The move comes about as a bit of a surprise and will see the studio working solely on Blizzard properties moving forward.

The story was broken by GamesIndustry.biz which detailed the move in greater detail. According to a representative from Blizzard, Vicarious Visions has been tapped to join the other side of the company after the publisher saw an “opportunity” of some sort. “After collaborating with Vicarious Visions for some time and developing a great relationship, Blizzard realized there was an opportunity for [Vicarious Visions] to provide long-term support,” representative explained.

In case you’re confused about how this even happened in the first place, Activision and Blizzard are actually a joint company. While the two entities largely operate independently of one another for the most part, occasionally moves like this are seen between the two. That being said, a move of this nature between the two parties is somewhat unprecedented.

What makes this decision on Activision-Blizzard’s part a bit surprising is that Vicarious Visions has found a lot of success with Activision in recent years. Both Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy and last year’s release of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2 were major achievements both critically and in terms of sales for the publisher. Clearly, it’s now hoped that those successes will transfer over to the Blizzard side of the entity.

Moving forward, it remains to be seen what Vicarious Visions will work on next. Prior to working on Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2, the studio was most well-known for creating the Skylanders series. Recent history would suggest that Vicarious might look to remaster an older Blizzard game, but we won’t know that for certain until further down the road.

With Vicarious Visions now being attached to Blizzard, what would you like to see the developer work on next? Let me know down in the comments or give me your thoughts over on Twitter at @MooreMan12.