Paramount announces new games studio, AAA TMNT game

Multimedia titan Paramount is getting into games in a big way, the company announced Friday alongside Summer Game Fest. A new games division, Paramount Games Studio, will now oversee all the company’s video game development.

Paramount Games Studio’s first confirmed project under that new entity is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin, which is being made by proven action-game developer PlatinumGames. Paramount Games includes two internal studios, including the one led by Amy Hennig, which is developing a Black Panther and Captain America game for Marvel. More Paramount Games projects will be announced shortly, but it sounds like the new studio has serious ambitions.

That includes making internally or finding partners to make games based on properties like Star Trek, SpongeBob SquarePants, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Avatar: The Last Airbender. It may even include games based on Top Gun, Mission: Impossible, and Yellowstone (or any of the properties in Tyler Sheridan’s television empire).

Ahead of Summer Game Fest, Polygon spoke to one of the executives overseeing Paramount Games Studio, head of creative and production Shawn Kittelsen, to find out what the new pillar of Paramount really means.

“The biggest change is that prior to the merger between Paramount and Skydance, Skydance was already invested in game development,” Kittelsen explained. “We had the two Skydance game studios: Skydance New Media under Amy Hennig working on Marvel 1943 and Skydance Interactive working on games like The Walking Dead Saints and Sinners and Behemoth for VR. It was understood as the merger was coming together that games would be a new priority for Paramount after the merger. In the combined company, we wanted games to be elevated. It would be a content pillar alongside film and TV.”

The two Skydance game studios are now under Paramount Games, as is the franchise licensing group that handled licensing for IP like TMNT and SpongeBob.

Kittelsen says the new mission for Paramount Games Studio is not just to license out Paramount’s stable of IP, but to create games.

“We’re going to make games ourselves internally,” he said. “We’re going to find co-development partners who are going to make games that we will fund and publish and that we will control. We've been on that mission ever since [the merger], building out a portfolio that's a combined mix of the internal teams, the external teams, and then licensing in all the areas where either we're not prepared to invest or where it just doesn't make sense for us to invest right now.

“We're being very purposeful and intentional about how we grow this business. The last thing that we want to do is try to grow too big, too fast, and find ourselves with a lot of commitments that we can't keep or more studios and projects than we can manage.”

Skydance New Media, under Hennig, is “focused on Marvel 1943 and building and finishing that game,” Kittelsen says. Sibling studio Skydance Interactive is now working on an unannounced premium PC and console game, based on an original property.

“Those teams are working on existing projects that sort of predate the merger. We're going to have them finish the projects that they're on and then talk about what their next projects are.”

Another project that predates the Paramount-Skydance merger is a Star Wars game announced in 2022 as a “richly cinematic action-adventure game featuring an original story.” Before I even got a chance to ask Kittelsen for an update on that, he reiterated what the focus for New Media was.

“We're focused on 1943 — one [game] at a time,” he said, casting no small amount of doubt that Hennig would ever get to realize her Star Wars dream.

Kittelsen said that the “core four” properties that Paramount Games is building upon are the Ninja Turtles, SpongeBob, Star Trek, and Avatar: The Last Airbender, but said that, ultimately, everything Paramount owns is up for discussion.

During our interview, Kittelsen mentioned less obvious properties like Survivor that could serve as future foundations for games.

“But then there's so much that we can still do with Top Gun. There's so much that we can do with Mission: Impossible. There's things like The Godfather in the catalog,” Kittelsen said. “There's South Park, which is a juggernaut, but with South Park the threshold for difficulty is really, really high there because you've got to make the game as funny as it deserves to be.

“That's part of making games a pillar for Paramount. […] The Survivor fan might not be looking for the $70 AAA Survivor game on PS5. Maybe they're looking for a mobile title, but by having a dedicated games division, we are going to push in all directions until we know that we're servicing every single IP that we can and every single fan that we can on the platform and with the genre of game and with whatever model it takes to reach them. But everything has to come from that player-first, fan-first perspective.”

Kittelsen stressed that Paramount Games is being incredibly selective — “We're not working with anyone who hasn't produced a classic before,” he said — and extremely careful about how it grows.

“Long term, we would definitely like to grow our internal capacity, but I think being very mindful of the lessons of the 2020s in games,” he said. “The worst thing that we could do would be to acquire a bunch of teams and studios at a rapid pace without doing the diligence.”