Cyanide Studio

Cyanide Studio is a developer and publisher.

Cyanide Studio Webpage, Facebook

A development studio based in the suburbs of Paris, dedicated to creating titles for personal computers, consoles, and mobile devices. The team specializes in sports games, but they've also worked on RPGs and adventure games. Some of the most popular series made by this relatively small team include Pro Cycling Manager, Blood Bowl, and Styx. Since 2018, Cyanide has been part of Nacon.

History

Sports games…

Cyanide Studio was founded in 2000 by former Ubisoft employees who wanted to make their dream cycling management game a reality. As a result, Cycling Manager launched on PC in 2000. The game was a sales hit, so a sequel came out a year later. That's how the series began, with new entries released every year.

The developers quickly applied what they'd learned to other sports, which led to new brands like Horse Racing Manager (which debuted in 2003), Pro Rugby Manager (which launched in 2004), and Winter Challenge, released in Poland as Olympic Winter Games 2007.

...but not only

Although management and sports simulators make up most of its portfolio, Cyanide Studio quickly branched out into other genres. The first of these was Chaos League in 2004, a unique mix of RTS, RPG, and sports gameplay. Players were thrown into a dark fantasy world, taking control of a team competing in brutal, American football-style matches. The game did moderately well, selling enough to warrant an expansion called Sudden Death a few months later.

In 2007, Cyanide Studio decided to try its hand at action RPGs. Developed by the team, Loki, released on PC, took players to a fantasy world inspired by European, Egyptian, and Native American myths. The game offered a full single-player campaign and a robust multiplayer mode, with options for both co-op and arena battles. It received a fairly lukewarm response from players and reviewers, so it hasn't gotten a sequel yet. Players had to wait two years for Cyanide's next release, not counting new entries in the Cycling Manager series or a one-off port of Runaway: The Dream of the Turtle for the Nintendo DS.

In 2009, Dungeon Party launched on PC, with the developers trying their hand at the free-to-play MMO market. That same year, Cyanide Studio also returned to the Chaos League concept, creating another brutal game inspired by American football. As the name suggests, Blood Bowl was based on the Games Workshop license, set in the dark Warhammer Fantasy universe. It launched on PC and consoles, selling well enough to later be ported to iOS and Android. (However, this wasn't Cyanide Studio's first iOS game - Dungeon Raiders, a fun action-RPG, actually debuted back in August 2009.)

Game of Thrones

That same year, the studio acquired the rights to the Game of Thrones franchise, paving the way for two games released in the following years. The first, PC-exclusive A Game of Thrones - Genesis from 2011, was a real-time strategy game with turn-based elements. The second, released less than a year later, was a classic RPG simply called Game of Thrones, available on PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.

At the same time, the studio was busy working on other projects as well. In 2012, Confrontation, a strategy game based on the miniature wargame by Rackham and set in the fantasy world of Aarklash, was released, along with Dungeonbowl, another take on American football featuring races from the Warhammer Fantasy universe. Later that year, Of Orcs and Men, developed by Cyanide Studio in collaboration with the Spiders team, was also released.

In 2013, the studio released four games, starting with Impire, a strategy game inspired by the classic Dungeon Keeper, and ending with Aarklash: Legacy, a tactical strategy game with RPG elements set in the world of the Confrontation miniature wargame. Notably, this was the first game Cyanide Studio published on its own.

In the following years, the studio stuck to its path, expanding its sports series while also creating new titles set in fantasy worlds. One of these was Dogs of War Online, another attempt to break into the free-to-play market. In 2014, Styx: Master of Shadows was released, a classic stealth game where players could uncover the story of one of the protagonists from Of Orcs and Men. The title was so well-received by players and critics that a sequel, Styx: Shards of Darkness, came out three years later in 2017. In the meantime, the studio also released a full-fledged second installment in the Blood Bowl series, along with a mobile spin-off, Blood Bowl: Kerrunch.

Beyond Call of Cthulhu and World of Darkness

In 2017, Cyanide announced Werewolf: The Apocalypse, based on the popular tabletop RPG known in Poland as Wilkolak: Apokalipsa. In 2018, it was announced that an RPG based on the cult classic Paranoia was in development. However, their release was still a long way off.

In May 2018, Nacon announced that it had acquired Cyanide Studio for €20 million. The team also passed along several projects to us, most notably Space Hulk: Tactics and Call of Cthulhu. The first was a tactical RPG set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, based on the 1989 tabletop game Space Hulk. The title debuted on October 9th for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. The second, meanwhile, was an adventure game with stealth and survival horror elements, based on H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. The game launched on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on October 30th, 2018, and nearly a year later, it came to the Nintendo Switch as well.

In 2019, Cyanide released two projects - aside from the next installment in the Tour de France/Pro Cycling Manager series, of course. These were the PC version of Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory (which mysteriously disappeared from the Epic Games Store in February 2020) and Blood Bowl: Death Zone, a multiplayer spin-off of the Blood Bowl series that left Early Access on Steam on July 10th, after spending less than a year there. Additionally, 2019 gave us new footage from the upcoming Werewolf: The Apocalypse game, and we learned it would carry the subtitle Earthblood.

For Cyanide Studio, 2020 was highlighted by the announcement of Blood Bowl III and the first footage from Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood. In June, we also got the first gameplay of Rogue Lords, a roguelite where you play as the Devil and lead an army of villains into battle, including Dracula, Baron Samedi, and Bloody Mary. All of the titles mentioned were scheduled for release in 2021, including Paranoia: Happiness is Mandatory, which had been announced nearly two years earlier, and were set to be published by Nacon.

On February 4th, 2021, Werewolf: The Apocalypse - Earthblood debuted. The game didn't get much love from critics, with an average Metacritic score of just 55/100 - and players rated it even lower. Reviews criticized its story, level design, and graphics, calling it repetitive and outdated.