Runic Games was founded in 2008 in Seattle, Washington by Max Schaefer, Erich Schaefer, Travis Baldree and Peter Hu, a founding group whose credentials read like a short history of the action RPG. Max and Erich Schaefer had co-founded Blizzard North and were lead figures on Diablo and Diablo II, the games that defined the click-to-loot formula, while several of the team arrived from Flagship Studios, the developer behind Hellgate: London and Mythos. Baldree himself had been lead designer on Mythos and on Fate, so the studio's lineage ran directly from the Diablo and Mythos tradition into its own work. That pedigree showed immediately: the first Torchlight arrived in 2009, a compact, colorful dungeon crawler built by a team that began as 17 developers. Perfect World Entertainment acquired the studio in 2010, and Runic continued operating under it, releasing Torchlight II on 20 September 2012 - a self-developed sequel that added online and LAN multiplayer, randomized worlds, and extensive mod support through Steam Workshop and an included editor.
Runic's third and final release was Hob in 2017, a departure from loot-driven combat into a quieter, puzzle-focused adventure, and the studio closed in November 2017. Its closure notice, still live on runicgames.com, describes the small team it started as and the three games it shipped. The Torchlight series has continued since under other hands, but Torchlight II remains available and is the Runic game PJ's Games carries. It is still one of the most-recommended entry points into the loot-driven action RPG genre: approachable where Diablo II demanded patience, generous with its randomized dungeons and class builds, and kept alive by a modding community that has been reshaping it since launch. It runs on Windows, Mac and Linux, so whether you are revisiting the game that carried the Diablo lineage forward or discovering the genre for the first time, Runic's work holds up as a benchmark for what a focused, veteran team can build.
