Moon Studios GmbH is an Austrian video game developer founded in 2010.[1] It is best known for its 2015 title Ori and the Blind Forest, for which the studio was awarded the Best Debut award at the 2016 Game Developers Choice Awards.[2] In 2020, the studio released a sequel, Ori and the Will of the Wisps. In 2024, Moon Studios released the action role-playing game No Rest for the Wicked in Early Access.
History
The studio was founded in 2010 by Thomas Mahler and Gennadiy Korol. During Mahler's tenure at Blizzard Entertainment, the successes of independent games like Castle Crashers, Limbo, and Braid encouraged him to leave the company to found an independent studio. The two chose the name "Moon Studios" as the company name as they were inspired by John F. Kennedy's quote, "We choose to go to the Moon". Mahler described Moon Studios as a "virtual studio," as the team did not rent an office and instead recruited talents from all over the world. Team members came from places such as