Cyanide is an independent and privately held video game studio. Based in Paris, it was created in 2000 and has risen to become one of the most productive game development studios in France. In 2007 the company opened a facility in Montreal, Canada and the headcount across both sites is currently 100.
The studio was started by 7 Ubisoft employees who left to follow their dream of making a sport management simulation, set in the world of professional cycling. 10 years on, with "Pro Cycling Manager" going each year to the top of the PC sales charts and extending now on consoles with “Tour de France”, the founders' initial hunch has more than proved itself. This intuition for what makes a hit-game has been key to the success of the studio.
Cyanide's original sporting bent was due in large part to the sporting tendencies of its founders. But behind the sport-management façade there was (and still is) a collection of hard-core gamers. Cyanide has more than one string to its bow, as games such as "Loki" (Action/RPG, 2007), "Blood Bowl" (sport/fantasy/RTS, 2009/2010) or "Dungeon Party" (F2P MMOG, 2009) have proved. These titles offer a rich pool of characters drawn from a wide variety of game universes.
In 2009, Cyanide secured the video game adaptation rights to George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series. As a result, a tactical, strategy game was released for the PC in the 3rd quarter of 2011 and an RPG released on PC and next-gen consoles in the first half of 2012. Since 2013, Cyanide also started to self-published its own games, such as the recent “Aarklash: Legacy” (tactical/RPG, 2013) based on a figurines IP acquired by the studio in 2010.
