There’s a lot more to Iron Galaxy than our 60+ shipped titles

Our Values

Everyone is welcome! We want you to be you. At IG, we celebrate and nurture our differences and know they make us all better every day. We are committed to an environment where staff can be their authentic selves regardless of race, gender, age, religion, ability, identity, orientation or experience. Diversity is how we will produce the best work in the business. This broad spectrum of perspectives and experiences contributes to our stability, which has been Iron Galaxy’s #1 goal since the day we were founded in 2008. As the cornerstone to our values, stability informs nearly every decision Iron Galaxy makes. We want Iron Galaxy to be a place that you can and want to retire from (the average tenure is more than five years), and our company values of People Partners, Capability, and Continuous Improvement help us do just that.

People

We know that the strength of our team is the foundation of our success

  • Valued: Every single person that works at Iron Galaxy matters
  • Passionate: We want to be one of the very best studios in the industry, and our passionate team helps us do just that
  • Experienced: Collectively, our team has many years of experience under our belt, and we’re always striving to get better every single day
  • Authenticity: We believe Iron Galaxy is a place where people of all backgrounds and experiences can feel welcome

Partners

Building strong relationships with industry giants helps us cultivate great partnerships and create amazing games

  • Collaborative: We value close collaboration during the development process at Iron Galaxy, and our partner relationships are no different
  • Authentic: True to ourselves and our capabilities, we’ll never over-promise our partners or tell them “what they want to hear”
  • Lasting: We love working with industry partners on their most treasured titles, so we do what we can to try and make our partnerships last
  • Respect: We respect our partners and make it a priority to work with partners who respect our employees

Continuous Improvement

We know we’re great at what we do, but we are always striving to be better than we are today

  • Enterprising: New things don’t scare us - they make us even better at what we do
  • Versatile: We’re always working on multiple platforms and engines, and adapt quickly to change
  • Resilient: It’s no secret that the game industry isn’t a walk in the park, and we roll with the punches with the best of them
  • Learning: We are always striving to learn to be a better and more welcoming company so that our team can be in a position to do its best work

Capability

Since day one, we’ve been pushing the boundaries of video game development

  • Adaptable: No challenge is too big or too small for us - we always try to be as adaptable as possible
  • Reliable: Some of the biggest publishers and developers in the industry trust us to work on their most important games because they know they can rely on us to get the job done
  • Experts: We can fix anything, and we pride ourselves on that
  • Versatility: We welcome challenges that allow us to reach multiple audiences and communities

Our Leadership

Dave1

Dave Lang

Founder

Dave founded Iron Galaxy in 2008 after a 5-year stint as Midway’s Technical Director at their Chicago studio. Dave bounced around to a few different game studios after getting his start in 1996, but after a while, he wanted to start a studio built on stability where he could work and retire with his best friends. Dave, along with the help of several industry veterans, helped take Iron Galaxy from a handful of employees to a company with more than 120 developers in just a few years. As the years progressed, Dave’s responsibilities have evolved.

Chelsea Headshot

Chelsea Blasko

COO

Chelsea got her start in games at Electronic Arts in Chicago where she served as a Production Coordinator on a variety of titles, as well as assistant to the GM. After spending a few years at Robomodo as a Producer and Project Manager, Dave convinced Chelsea to share her production expertise at Iron Galaxy. Chelsea quickly took over the entire company’s production department and internal operations of the company before becoming the COO of the studio. These days, Chelsea oversees all of Iron Galaxy’s projects and people. As Iron Galaxy’s “designated adult in the room,” Chelsea works hard to help ensure the wheels don’t fall off of the entire studio. We want to keep Iron Galaxy open forever, and Chelsea is key to making sure that we can do just that.

Adam 2x

Adam Boyes

CEO

Adam started working in the game industry the same year Dave did, 1996. Getting his start at Electronic Arts Canada in the QA department, Adam eventually moved to Chicago and joined Midway’s production team in 2003. During his time at Midway, Adam eventually took on the role of Executive Producer, working on MLB Slugfest and Blitz: The League. From there, Adam ended up as Director of Production at Capcom Canada for a few years before deciding to start his own company Beefy Media. In 2012, Adam joined Sony Interactive Entertainment America as Vice President of Third Party Relations. His strong desire to get back to his roots and start working on the actual creation of games again led him to Iron Galaxy, where he has served as CEO since 2016.

Our History

  1. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    A thread about video game job stability by me, Sentient Redwood and Husk of a Man, Dave Lang. Please buckle up.

  2. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    My first job was at Sculptured Software in Salt Lake City. I started Jan 4th, 1996 and I ended up quitting sometime in 1998. It's here where I had my first close call.
    Sometime between me accepting the job and me starting, Sculptured got bought by Acclaim.

  3. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    About a year into this relationship, Acclaim fired all the Leadership at the studio and brought in some people from Iguana to re-org and run the ship. I had the pleasure of re-interviewing for a job I already had at this time. It was pretty scary for me.

  4. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    It ended up being okay, I kept my job, as did most people, and they made some smart choices about who should be running the "new Sculptured." That being said I was real mad, because I was loyal to the management team that had been cast aside, and didn't like how things went down.

  5. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    But regardless I dodged a bullet and had a job. @tcarbone got Acclaim to agree that if we finished what we were working on at the time (NHL Breakaway 98 for N64), we'd get to keep my royalties even after we left . They honored this agreement and I'm forever thankful for that.

  6. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    Because I did leave, pretty much as soon as the game was approved by Nintendo. The old management team started a company called Kodiak Interactive. I quit, applied there, and had a job the next day. It was cool being at a start-up, I felt important being in on the ground floor.

  7. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    The beginning of Kodiak was some of the most fun I ever had. We got to build technology and engines from scratch, and I learned so much about what's important for game engineering during this time. Mostly due to making so many mistakes. I guess while I'm talking about this time..

  8. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    I should apologize to everyone that had to work with me. I was a complete asshole to work with back then. Full of myself and thinking I was the smartest person in the room. If you had to deal with that, well, I'm sorry. But I digress.

  9. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    After about three years at Kodiak I had helped ship 2 wrestling games, and stared on a 3rd, MLB Inside Pitch. That is, until Kodiak closed overnight on us with zero notice or severance. I was really hurt the management team I followed to this new studio could treat me this way.

  10. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    I learned a lot, though. I learned to expect a company to always work in its own best interests. That loyalty is a myth. It helped me greatly at Microsoft Game Studios Salt Lake. They hired a handful of us to finish our baseball game.

  11. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    Suffice to say I didn't like my time there, I didn't like the way the studio treated the baseball team, nor the way it was run. After we shipped baseball, the studio declared they were going from being a 4-game studio to a 2-game studio.

  12. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    It wasn't hard to see that I was about to get canned, and thanks to the learnings from Kodiak I knew what to do: start applying for jobs right away. It was also about this time me and my wife wanted to start having kids, so I applied in the Chicago area, and got hired at Midway.

  13. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    The first three months at Midway were rough. I was the lead on Slugfest Loaded, and the old team had been working on a complete reboot of Slugfest while we shoved this latest version out the door. Within a month, the next-gen Slugfest was cancelled, and I feared for my job again

  14. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    I had a 2-month old kid at home, and a new house, so I couldn't afford to lose my job. I started working 80-90 hour weeks just to be seen as someone who was valuable to the company. I kept this up (with others, for sure) for the duration of the project.

  15. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    My wife used to bring Syd into the office for lunch so I could see her. It was a pretty sad time.
    Slugfest shipped, and several people lost their jobs, but luckily my efforts had been noticed and I was put in as lead of the Blitz team. This changed my life for the better.

  16. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    We shipped Blitz The League, and somehow it sold like 1.6M copies. I'm still not sure how it happened. Then I got promoted to TD of the Sports Group. Shortly after that I got promoted to Studio TD. As it turns out I missed programming and didn't like that job but it seemed stable

  17. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    Until Stranglehold shipped, anyway, and it was clear Midway was doomed. I stuck it out for a bit and tried make it work, but without a clear path forward I eventually decided to just quit and try contracting for a bit. It can't be any worse than what I had been through already.

  18. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    That's when I started @IToTheG. For a long time I wasn't sure if it would ever be anyone besides me. I fantasized about making it something bigger but I didn't know why I'd be doing it.
    I worked out of my basement for a bit and got really lonely. I missed my team.

  19. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    This made me think a lot about why I was doing what I did, what I value about my work, and how I should prioritize my time going forward.
    From this thought came the core principle of what @IToTheG is today. It informs every decision we make, and guides us when we are lost.

  20. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    I decided to build a company where I could work with my friends for the rest of my life. That's it. Super simple.
    Making lots of money, getting to work on dream projects, winning awards, it's all nice but I realized it's not what makes me happy.

  21. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    That vision puts company stability above all else. Nothing gets in the way of us doing what we can to survive in an industry that is volatile at best. I'm happy to say in our 10.5 years in business we've never let anyone go because we ran out of money.

  22. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    That's not to say it's always been easy or things haven't been tight. They have. Several times. But everyone at the company knows we are doing the best we can to make sure they have a job for as long as they want one. That means a lot to me.

  23. Dave Lang
    @JosephJBroni

    So if that sounds good to you, please consider applying here. We've got several openings /fin

  1. A Thread
    The Beginning
  2. Sculptured Software
    1996
  3. Acclaim
    1997
  4. Acclaim
    1997
  5. NHL Breakaway
    1997
  6. Kodiak Interactive
    1998
  7. Learning
    1998
  8. Apologies
    1998
  9. Sudden Closure
    2001
  10. Microsoft Game Studios
    2001
  11. Acclaim
    3 Mar
  12. Acclaim
    28 Feb
  13. Kodiak Interactive
    20 Mar
  14. Acclaim
    20 May
  15. Scultured Software
    09 Jul
  16. Kodiak Interactive
    30 Aug
  17. Acclaim
    15 Sep
  18. Scultured Software
    01 Nov
  19. Kodiak Interactive
    10 Dec
  20. Kodiak Interactive
    29 Jan
  21. Acclaim
    3 Mar
  22. Kodiak Interactive
    29 Jan
  23. The End
    3 Mar

Our Work

60+

Shipped Titles

10+

Platforms

20+

Partners

Games We Worked On

Full Game Development

Iron Galaxy, like many other studios, especially enjoys getting to fully develop creative projects from the ground up. Shortly after Microsoft launched the Kinect in 2012, Iron Galaxy quickly got to work developing a game on the new hardware and released our first original product, Wreckateer. The most famous two-button fighting game in the world, Divekick, launched a year later and was our second original product.

As we continued to make a name for ourselves in the fighting game community and the games industry at large, Microsoft enlisted us to lead the development of the famed fighting game franchise, Killer Instinct for Xbox One. Taking over from Double Helix in 2015, Iron Galaxy solidified our place in the fighting game community with our work on Seasons 2 and 3 of KI, and as we get bigger and bigger each year, we’ve continued working on our own original IP development along the way.

  • Killer Instinct
  • Divekick
  • Wreckateer
  • Extinction
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Port Projects

Iron Galaxy has been helping some of the game studios in the industry port their projects to the latest and greatest platforms since we were founded. After we wrapped up our first port project, Snood for the iOS, we continued helping industry giants like Capcom, Square Enix, and 2K bring their great titles over to the PS3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii and more. Our critically acclaimed console port of Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online Edition officially put Iron Galaxy on the map, and we haven’t looked back since. Partnering with Bethesda to bring Skyrim to the Switch, and working closely with Blizzard to bring Diablo III to the Switch, are just the latest in a string of stellar port projects that help set us apart from any other independent studio working today.

  • Skyrim
  • Crash Bandicoot
  • Spyro Reignited Trilogy
  • Borderlands 2
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Support Projects

We’re well-known for our ports, but publishers such as Gearbox and Bethesda have trusted us for years to help other fantastic studios co-develop games alongside their teams. We’ve always enjoyed teaming up with other talented developers and studios across the industry to help create and ship great projects, and we’re always open to co-development opportunities.

  • Dreadnought
  • Fallout 76
  • Overwatch
  • Diablo III
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Platforms We Work On

Our Partners