Vin Diesel forms Tigon Studios

Vin Diesel has formed Tigon Studios, the videogame company he first mentioned during a promotional tour to support the theatrical release of xXx, and is already intrinsically involved in the development of The Chronicles of Riddick on Xbox.

Tigon is helmed by Cos Lazouras, who was happy to clarify the company's involvement in the Riddick project, which is under development at Starbreeze, the Swedish team behind the critically acclaimed Enclave.

"Tigon has worked closely with [publisher] VU Games and Starbreeze in all aspects of the game's development from the beginning," he told us earlier. "Aside from Vin lending his face and voice to the game, some other areas we were involved in include story creation, writing of dialogue, directing cinematics, character design, and overseeing the game development from a creative standpoint."

Indeed, although the company will not directly develop the games it releases, Diesel reportedly wants to be very hands-on with each title, and as a long-time gamer himself he wants his games to stand up on artistic merit rather than because of film attachment or other predictable gimmicks.

That said, one of Diesel's key strengths in this field is his connection to Hollywood, something he's obviously well aware of: "I have been very fortunate in that I have the ability to get other incredible artists from the film and music worlds to lend their voices, talent and excitement to these games," he was quoted as saying last week.

The Chronicles of Riddick, based on Diesel's forthcoming big-screen outing of the same name, certainly caught our eye recently mainly thanks to its gorgeous visuals - something we've come to expect from Starbreeze - and we'll be hoping to take a closer look at it if it makes it onto VU Games' E3 stand this year.