Assassin's Creed creative director founding THQ Montreal studio

THQ has been on a bit of an original intellectual property tear as of late. Earlier this year, the American company announced it would publish Devil's Third, the new action game from Japanese bad-boy developer Tomonobu Itagaki. Then, this summer, reports surfaced that Hellboy director Guillermo del Toro was developing on a "Lovecraftian" horror role-playing game for the Santa Monica-based publisher, likely due out in 2013.

Today, THQ announced another pillar in its original IP push. The company has hired Patrice Désilets to help it found a new studio in Montreal, site of his former employer Ubisoft Montreal. There, Désilets garnered acclaim for his work as creative director on Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and the wildly successful Assassin's Creed series. He is also represented by the Creative Artists Agency, a top Hollywood talent agency.

According to THQ, Désilets will begin work next summer at the studio, where his first job will be "the hiring of a new team that will develop new intellectual properties for THQ." The company's vision is to have the new Quebecois shop draw on the large game-development talent pool in Montreal, which is also the site of internal studios of Electronic Arts, its BioWare RPG label, and Square Enix's Eidos label.

For more on Désilets' last Ubisoft project, Assassin's Creed 2, read GameSpot's full review or interview with the man himself.