Dominic Robilliard and Amy Hennig, two key developers behind some high-profile Star Wars games that got canceled, have united at Star Wars and Marvel games developer Skydance New Media. Robilliard will be joining the studio that Hennig presides over shortly after Sony shut down his former employer and first-party PlayStation developer, PixelOpus.
In between his two lengthy stints at Sony, Robilliard worked at Lucasfilm as the creative director of the eventually canceled Star Wars 1313 game, which was meant to follow the adventures of a bounty hunter on planet Coruscant. The game was canned in 2013, after Disney acquired Lucasfilm and shuttered all of its game development endeavors. Around that time is when EA acquired its exclusive Star Wars games license from Disney and promptly greenlit Project Ragtag, a narrative-driven Star Wars game made by Dead Space developer Visceral. That project, led by Hennig, died four years later with EA dissolving the studio.
Following a brief freelancing streak, Hennig eventually moved to Skydance, where she was appointed as the head of Skydance New Media just as the studio was founded in 2019. Earlier this week, Robilliard announced he'll soon be joining the developer in the capacity of game director, adding that an opportunity to revisit the Star Wars universe and collaborate on Skydance's upcoming Marvel game set in WW2 is "a dream come true." Hennig commented that the studio is "thrilled" about the appointment.
Skydance New Media is not to be confused with Skydance Interactive, which is another game development arm of production company Skydance Media. That particular studio was founded in 2016 and predominantly specializes in VR experiences such as The Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners - Chapter 2 and Archangel. And while both companies seem eager to develop licensed properties, Skydance New Media managed to secure the rights to make games based on some of the biggest IPs in all entertainment straight out of the gate.
Its team of industry veterans led by Hennig likely helped convince Marvel and Disney to greenlight the company's first projects, though that's not to understate the pull of the studio's parent company. Namely, video games might be a relatively young business for Skydance Media, but the California production powerhouse has been a well-known quantity in Hollywood for a long while, having put out dozens of hit movies like the Coen brothers' True Grit, Top Gun: Maverick, and multiple Mission: Impossible films.
Skydance also diversified into television around a decade back and has so far released successful shows such as Altered Carbon and Jack Ryan. So, while its upcoming Star Wars and Marvel titles are certainly its biggest game development efforts to date, the company has quite a pedigree for producing entertainment with a mass appeal.