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Crate Entertainment LLC is a small, privately owned, indie-startup founded in February 2008 by former Iron Lore lead designer, Arthur Bruno. In late 2009, Crate acquired the rights to the Iron Lore codebase and began working on a new Action-RPG that would become Grim Dawn. Starting as a team of only two full-time people with the support of volunteers, Crate has grown thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign in May 2012, the alpha release of Grim Dawn in May 2013 and the game's debut on Steam Early Access in November 2013. In 2015, Crate had a team of eight veteran developers, striving to make Grim Dawn a stand-out title in the genre. In 2016, they released Grim Dawn, and have been working on post-launch content since then.
History[]
Following Iron Lore's failure to secure funding for its next project, it was announced on February 18, 2008 that former members of Iron Lore had created a new company. Several days later it was announced that the company would be working as a contractor for fellow Massachusetts based Demiurge Studios, providing art and design leadership on one of the company's projects.
Several months later on August 19, 2008 Crate announced the acquisition of the Black Legion intellectual property that has been in development at Iron Lore Entertainment before that studio closed. Iron Lore had attracted significant interest from publishers while pitching Black Legion in late 2007 but had not been able to survive long enough to close a publishing deal. Crate had hoped to pick up on the momentum that Black Legion had gained but due to the U.S. economic recession publishers opted to pass on a large project from the studio.
After nearly a year of silence, Crate announced on July 27, 2009 that the company had acquired licensing to use Iron Lore's Titan Quest game engine for their new action role-playing game project. On January 21, 2010 Crate announced that the name of their new project would be Grim Dawn.
In an update provided to the Grim Dawn Kickstarter project on April 18, 2012, Crate revealed that the core of the company consists of only two full-time employees, with additional work being provided by former Iron Lore employees when needed.
After the strong success of the Kickstarter campaign (where they received nearly double their funding target in pledges), Crate were able to hire additional staff, several of whom were former employees of the failed 38 Studios. This allowed Crate to significantly increase the rate of development, and on May 15 2013 the Grim Dawn alpha (Build 8) was released. On November 5 2013 the game was released on Steam Early Acess.
In June 2015 Crate announced that they had hired Eric Sexton, former artist and designer at Blizzard North, stating that his role primarily involved world building and the development of lore.
On February 25, 2016, Crate announced the Full Release of Grim Dawn, and indicated that work would soon begin on future updates, modding tool release, "Survival Mode" and the expansion. The Survival Mode pledge was fulfilled on August 5, 2016 with the release of The Crucible DLC.
On October 11, 2017, Crate released the much-anticipated Expansion to Grim Dawn, Ashes of Malmouth. The expansion contained two new Masteries and two new chapters in the Grim Dawn story, along with hundreds of new items, monsters, quests and locations.
On March 27, 2019, the second major expansion, Forgotten Gods, was released. It featured 1 new mastery, new devotion trees, movement skills, and a new game mode called the The Shattered Realm.