Volition opened their doors in 1993 and they spent the next 30 years developing a slew of critically-acclaimed action games such as Descent, Red Faction, and Saints Row. But that all came to and end in 2023 when the studio was shuttered by parent company Deep Silver.
In the year-and-a-half since the closure, curators at the Strong Museum of Play have been contact with developers from Volition to collect and catalog the company’s expansive history. Earlier this week, the museum’s Director of Digital Preservation, Andrew Borman, announced the acquisition of the Volition Collection on LinkedIn:
While we have only just begun to process the collection, I am beginning to understand some of what it might contain. […] We can explore games that were unreleased and never made it to market, such as various Saints Row spinoffs and their prototypes, many of which haven’t been seen before. We are honored to preserve the history and legacy of Volition, and the work of many Volitionites that made such incredible games.
Among the items that The Strong was given include an early prototype of Saints Row (which was then known as Bling Bling) and Descent 4 (an unreleased prequel that was reworked into Red Faction).
Staff members at The Strong are currently working with the collection and “organizing, cataloguing, and migrating data from optical discs and other storage formats” to make it available to the public at a future date.