staff including Tomonobu Itagaki. The game was slated to be a departure from Itagaki's previous genres, hack and slash and fighting games. Devil's Third began life as an intended Xbox 360 exclusive to be published by Microsoft Game Studios. After the partnership fell through, Itagaki met with Danny Bilson, then employed at THQ, who would share his vision of the title and agreed to publish it for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC. However, THQ would eventually be forced to drop publishing for the title following their bankruptcy in 2013, leaving Valhalla Game Studios without a partner to release the game with. Unlike other THQ intellectual property, which was sold to other publishers, the rights to Devil's Third were given back to Valhalla Game Studios. Despite the bankruptcy of THQ, Danny Bilson continued to act as a creative consultant on the title "until the very end". Following the lack of THQ support, Valhalla Game Studios would partner with South Korean company Doobic to produce and publish the title. The Doobic partnership also promised a multi-platform release, including mobile platforms and PCs; however, Doobic eventually went out of business, setting back the development of Devil's Third even further, and leaving Valhalla Game Studios again to try and find a partner. The setbacks caused by the collapse of both THQ and Doobic landed the game in development hell for several years. During this time, Valhalla Game Studios CEO Satoshi Kanematsu approached then-Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, who agreed to publish the title for Wii U. Itagaki stated that Nintendo published Devil's Third because "they don't have enough strong online games", and that it wasn't "a game that Nintendo could make internally, so we came in as their mercenaries to make a strong online game." Devil's Third was re-revealed as a Wii U exclusive at E3 2014 via IGN following Nintendo's E3 Digital Event and released the following year. Devil's Third switched engines during its development, as the company responsible for making its original engine closed down. Since that time, Valhalla Game Studios had continued development using an adaptation of video game developer Relic Entertainment's engine. Although a version of Devil's Third for the Wii U was not confirmed at the time, Itagaki reported that the game would run perfectly fine on the system. Devil's Third now uses Unreal Engine 3 as the main game engine. On June 23, Nintendo announced that the online