Eighth Lantern Studios began as a side project in the months after the 2025 Microsoft layoffs that saw the cancellation of Project Blackbird at Zenimax Online Studios. We suddenly found ourselves in an extremely tough job market at a time of rapid change in the industry caused by corporate restructuring, investment withdrawal, changing player habits, the rise of LLMs, and many other factors. 

Gabe Sheets, who had been at Zenimax for four years working as Lead Encounter Designer, saw an opportunity to band together with other like-minded devs and work on a game in the Unreal Engine. The strategy was simple: keep our skills sharp, improve our proficiency with Unreal, and keep some sense of structure and community to our day-to-day lives. In the meantime, we would all keep looking for work, but also, although it was clearly a long shot, if we felt that the prototype we were building had legs, we’d make a go at getting it funded so we could build it for real.

Well, it turns out we all fell in love with the project, and not only that, we’re certain that it’s something worth sharing with the rest of the world. So, here we are. At this point, many of the people who started this with us have had to leave, but we’re pushing forward with a skeleton crew that even now is still packed with talent and decades of industry experience.

We now feel that this is a transformative moment for the industry and we’re diving in with a now-or-never attitude bolstered by the confidence that what we have to offer is going to be delightful.

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Eighth Lantern Studios

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Eighth Lantern Studios

Org chart

Teams

Offices

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