Paramount Games Studio Launches With PlatinumGames on The Last Ronin

TMNT: The Last Ronin arrived at Summer Game Fest Friday as the opening announcement of Paramount Games Studio, Paramount’s newly formed in-house publisher, with PlatinumGames confirmed as developer and no release date set. The division merges Skydance Interactive and Skydance New Media into a single entity and opens with an existing pipeline that includes Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra and an untitled Star Wars project.

Tony Driscoll, named president of the new studio, is simultaneously Paramount’s EVP of Corporate Strategy and Development, leading integration planning for the company’s $110 billion pending acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. That deal, currently in regulatory review, is expected to close in Q3 2026.

Paramount Games Studio Makes Its Play

The Summer Game Fest teaser for The Last Ronin was brief and withheld almost everything. It opened on a ruined New York City skyline with smoke rising from rubble, cut to quick shots of a sai and a hockey mask, then closed on a lone silhouetted figure under a blood-red moon while an electric guitar arrangement of the original 1987 TMNT cartoon theme played underneath. Paramount’s official description offers only “a lone surviving Turtle embarks on a seemingly hopeless mission seeking justice for the family he lost,” with no further narrative detail in the reveal.

Readers of the source material know the survivor is Michelangelo. In the original IDW series, he carries all four brothers’ weapons in tribute to who he lost. The game is confirmed for console and PC; the official Last Ronin game update page went live for fan signups alongside the reveal.

The new division brings together Skydance Interactive, which had worked primarily on VR and action titles, and Skydance New Media, which has focused on narrative AAA development. According to Paramount’s official studio formation announcement, the studio aims to publish across casual and AAA categories while drawing from Paramount’s full IP catalog. Amy Hennig, who co-led Skydance New Media, moves to studio creative director; her co-president Julian Beak has left the company. Dan Prigg, previously head of Skydance Interactive, becomes EVP and head of games. Shawn Kittelsen is SVP of creative and production.

In announcing the launch, the studio’s president described it as “a meaningful evolution in how we think about games,” a content pillar alongside film and television.

The Project That Went Quiet in 2023

TMNT: The Last Ronin had a previous development history, and the new version shares little with it. In early 2023, THQ Nordic announced it would publish a game based on the comic with Black Forest Games, best known at the time for the Destroy All Humans! remake series, as developer. The pitch described a darker, more mature take drawing from modern action RPGs, a reveal trailer landed to strong fan response, and then both studios went silent.

By early 2024, Black Forest Games had undergone significant layoffs as part of broader THQ Nordic staff reductions. No public updates came through all of 2025, no screenshots, no preview coverage, no leaks despite the project’s standing in the games press.

Kittelsen confirmed at Summer Game Fest that the Black Forest version is “defunct.” The project now in production is a separate work with no known connection to the prior team’s output. THQ Nordic has not publicly addressed the transition; the TMNT intellectual property belongs to Paramount through Nickelodeon, and the original publishing arrangement appears to have lapsed as development stalled.

Paramount’s gaming strategy was reorganizing during the same period. The Skydance merger, which closed last summer and brought two game studios into Paramount’s orbit, was the foundational move; this week’s studio launch is the visible output of that consolidation.

PlatinumGames Gets a Second Shot at the Turtles

A 2016 Game That Didn’t Get Its Due

PlatinumGames, the Osaka-based action studio behind NieR: Automata, Bayonetta, and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, made one previous TMNT title: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan, published by Activision in 2016. The game received mixed reviews and was pulled from digital storefronts within months of its release.

Kittelsen addressed the 2016 game directly in press interviews Friday:

That game did not get the kind of support that I think that the Turtles deserve or that Platinum deserves. So this was also a chance to do justice by Platinum’s TMNT fans and say, ‘Hey, let’s see what they can really do when we get some of the resources.’

That’s Kittelsen, speaking to GameFile News on Friday. He described PlatinumGames’ pitch for The Last Ronin as going “about so much more than I expected,” deeper into the property’s narrative ambitions than the studio had anticipated.

Who’s Leading This One

Overseeing development at the studio is Yohei Shimbori, a former Tekken series producer at Bandai Namco. He’ll be supported by veterans already at PlatinumGames, though the specific team composition hasn’t been publicly detailed.

The studio has seen notable departures in recent years. Hideki Kamiya, PlatinumGames’ co-founder and the creative force behind Bayonetta, left in October 2023. By February 2025, five more directors had departed: Abebe Tinari, Takahisa Taura, Yusuke Miyata, Kenji Saito, and Masaki Yamanaka. Several joined Kamiya at Clovers Inc., his new studio now working on an Okami sequel.

Kevin Eastman and series writer Tom Waltz wrote the original five-issue series, published by IDW Publishing from 2020 to 2022, and it sold out multiple printings. Set in a New York ruled by the Foot Clan, the story follows Michelangelo on a revenge mission carrying all four brothers’ weapons. A prequel comic, The Last Ronin: Training Day, written by Eastman and Waltz, lands July 9; Paramount is also releasing a limited BossLogic merch collection timed to the announcement.

Driscoll’s Dual Mandate

Driscoll took on the studio president role while keeping his existing position. Per Paramount’s announcement, he “will continue to lead our integration planning effort for the Warner Bros. Discovery transaction” alongside running the new division. His background spans Epic Games, where he built the IP Partner Program that structures how major brands appear inside Fortnite, followed by roles at Warner Bros., AT&T, and Walt Disney Imagineering, where he started his career. He has said publicly that Imagineering’s approach to putting audiences inside a world shaped how he thinks about what franchise IP can do in games.

Amy Hennig moves from co-president of Skydance New Media to studio creative director for all of Paramount Games Studio. She has been overseeing Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra and the untitled Star Wars project from her New Media role; both continue under the new banner. Julian Beak, who held the co-president title alongside her, left the company when the restructuring was announced, ending the separate brand identities of both Skydance studios, which now operate as one production entity.

Dan Prigg, formerly head of Skydance Interactive, is EVP and head of games for Paramount. Ray Davis serves as SVP of Engineering; Andrea Silvers is SVP of Marketing and Communications; Kara Bilkiss is SVP of Business Development and Licensing. Up to now, Paramount’s gaming activity consisted almost entirely of licensing TMNT, SpongeBob, and other properties to third parties; the new studio ends that model.

What Happens When WB Games Arrives?

What WB Games Already Has

WB Games operates studios including Rocksteady (Batman Arkham series), NetherRealm (Mortal Kombat), Avalanche Software (Hogwarts Legacy), TT Games (the LEGO game series), and WB Games Montreal, with additional offices across North America and the UK. All of it comes to Paramount as part of the acquisition.

A September Deadline

Per the WBD 8-K merger agreement filed with the SEC, the deal is expected to close in Q3 2026. If it hasn’t closed by September 30, WBD shareholders receive a 25-cent-per-share quarterly ticking fee. A full regulatory collapse would trigger a $7 billion termination fee payable by Paramount.

What the acquisition means for the two game publishing operations hasn’t been publicly addressed. WB Games studios have operated with significant production autonomy under WBD, each franchise on its own development cycle. Whether Paramount Games Studio and the incoming WB Games operation share a structure, split along IP lines, or consolidate further is an open question ahead of the close.

An IP Library From TMNT to SpongeBob

Beyond The Last Ronin, the studio’s creative leadership has described its top franchise priorities as a “big four”: TMNT, SpongeBob SquarePants, Star Trek, and Avatar: The Last Airbender. The ranking draws on each property’s existing gaming history and audience demographics. The studio has said it’s matching each property to the platform and audience most likely to respond to a new game rather than applying one format across all four.

Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra and the untitled Star Wars project are the two games furthest along in production, both carried over from Skydance New Media. Rise of Hydra is set during World War II and has been in development for several years under Hennig’s oversight. The Star Wars game, developed with Lucasfilm, remains untitled with no gameplay details confirmed.

Additional properties available to the studio beyond these priorities include:

• Mission: Impossible
• Top Gun
• South Park
• Yellowstone
• Dora the Explorer
• Paw Patrol

Paramount expects the WBD deal to close by end of Q3, at which point the company will be operating both the studio launched this June and a publisher with more than two decades of releases behind it, with no public statement yet on how the two game operations fit together.