ProbablyMonsters, a game studio collective headquartered in Bellevue, Wash., announced Tuesday that it’s founded a new internal development team called Hidden Grove.
The team at Hidden Grove is headed by general manager Chris Opdahl and design directors Raylene Deck and Grant Mackay. All three are former developers on Bungie’s MMO shooter Destiny 2 who first landed at ProbablyMonsters in 2020.
Hidden Grove’s debut project is an “original multiplayer competitive adventure game” in Unreal Engine 5. According to a ProbablyMonsters representative, the project has been “in incubation” and is only now being announced.
Other members of the new team include executive producer Lori Ada Kilty, a former program manager at Xbox Game Studios; art director Jedd Chevrier, freelance illustrator and former creative lead at Microsoft Hololens; senior engineering director Dean Johnson, a former engineering manager at Microsoft and 343 Industries; and narrative director Kate Welch, former lead designer at Wizards of the Coast.
Founded in 2016 by former Bungie CEO Harold Ryan, ProbablyMonsters bills itself as “building a family of sustainable game studios through a people-first culture.” Ryan told GeekWire in 2019 that the role of ProbablyMonsters is to “manage the business side for [its studios] and help them to grow,” while maintaining a path for each studio to go independent.
The company went through a round of layoffs in September.
ProbablyMonsters also announced on Tuesday that it hired Adam Rymer as its new chief product officer. Rymer, the former CEO of e-sports firm OpTic Gaming and former president of Nerdist Industries, will report directly to Ryan.
Hidden Grove is the newest ProbablyMonsters team to go public, joining Battle Barge, which is in development on an unnamed “next-gen” cooperative RPG, and Cauldron, which halted development on its debut project in June.
Another team, Firewalk Studios, was acquired by Sony last year, which revealed Firewalk’s debut game Concord as a PlayStation exclusive last May.
