Striking Distance Studios

Striking Distance Studios is an AAA video game development studio creating narrative-driven action, survival-horror and roguelike experiences for PC and current-generation consoles. Founded in 2019 as a development subsidiary of KRAFTON, Inc., the studio combines game design, engineering, technical art and high-fidelity character work in full-cycle production.

Its debut release, The Callisto Protocol (2022), is a single-player sci-fi survival-horror game set in the Black Iron Prison universe. The studio later delivered [REDACTED] (2024), an isometric roguelike action game set in the same universe.

Development capabilities

Striking Distance Studios’ work spans:

• Full-cycle game design and development
• Narrative design, world building and gameplay programming
• Photorealistic real-time rendering, digital character art and visual-effects engineering
• Motion capture, high-fidelity animation and technical art production
• Unreal Engine systems, advanced pipeline tooling and cross-platform engineering
• Audio design and Wwise audio integration

The studio’s production work emphasizes real-time graphics research, visual fidelity and cinematic digital-human presentation. Its Spain operation contributes specialist creative engineering, rendering research and photorealistic pipeline development alongside the wider game-development team.

Company history

Glen Schofield founded the studio in June 2019. After his departure in September 2023, Chief Development Officer Steve Papoutsis assumed executive leadership. In 2025, KRAFTON moved Papoutsis to lead sister studio Unknown Worlds Entertainment while Striking Distance Studios continued operating as a KRAFTON development subsidiary.

The company maintains an active public identity under its SDS brand and continues to develop games across its United States headquarters and Spain-based engineering operation.