The studio is the rebranding of Irrational Games as announced in February 2017, and while still the same business subsidiary under Take-Two Interactive, the rebranding was considered a fresh start by the founders as they move into more emergent narrative-driven titles compared to the larger titles they had made under Irrational.

Levine expressed how much stress completing a large title was at the conclusion of work of BioShock Infinite, and decided that he would drastically trim down the studio "to refocus my energy on a smaller team with a flatter structure and a more direct relationship with gamers.

[12] At the 2014 Game Developers Conference following the restructure, Levine presented his idea of "narrative Legos" that he wanted to explore with this studio.

[14] During a presentation at the March 2017 EGX Rezzed conference, Levine said that this game uses a system inspired by the Nemesis System within Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor, which he found provided a way to include a larger metanarrative in a game without having to customize a lot of story or dialog for it.

[16] By the start of 2022, Bloomberg News reported that work on the studio's first game had fallen into development hell, having been in progress for at least seven years.