Fatshark AB is a Swedish video game studio based in Stockholm, founded in 2008 by Martin Wahlund, Rikard Blomberg, Joakim Wahlström and Johan Jonker. The team grew out of Northplay, a company that spent 2003 to 2008 doing subcontract work for various Swedish companies. That background stayed with the studio: alongside its own releases, Fatshark has worked as a subcontractor on several AAA titles for PC and consoles. Its early catalog moved quickly between genres. Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West arrived in 2010 as a team-based frontier shooter. In 2011 came Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 for PS3 and Xbox Live Arcade, plus the puzzle adventure Hamilton's Great Adventure. Krater followed in 2012, a squad-based action RPG set in a post-apocalyptic Sweden. That same year War of the Roses put players in armor on the battlefields of fifteenth-century England, and its 2014 follow-up War of the Vikings carried the idea north. Both were built around weighty, directional first-person melee combat. Escape Dead Island and Bloodsports.TV rounded out the period, but the sword work of those medieval games pointed toward what came next.
That next step was Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide in 2015, a four-player co-op first-person melee game set in the Warhammer Fantasy Battles world. It sent a band of heroes to hold back the Skaven, the ratmen swarming up from beneath the city of Ubersreik. Fatshark self-published Warhammer: Vermintide 2 on Steam in 2018, and the sequel widened the fight. Five heroes, each with their own careers, face both the Skaven horde and a Chaos army marching out of the north. Its combat rewards reading a crowd, managing stamina and covering your teammates when the special enemies strike. The game has since reached PS4, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. In 2022, Warhammer 40,000: Darktide brought the formula into the grim far future on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. The studio's ownership changed alongside that success. In January 2019 Tencent acquired a stake of about 36% in a deal worth roughly 500 million SEK (around US$56 million). In January 2021 it took a majority stake that valued the company at around 2.2 billion SEK (around US$260 million). Fatshark is now a Tencent subsidiary with around 180 employees, and the Stockholm studio is still the name to know for co-op action where every swing carries weight and the horde never stops coming.
