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Former Arkane Austin head Harvey Smith recently announced his new studio, Black Pony Immersive. As the name suggests will be dedicated to making immersive sims in the tradition of Deus Ex and System Shock. It’s a commitment that I wholeheartedly support, though as is always the case with this genre, there’s a concern over whether such a move is commercially viable.
As it turns out, however, this isn’t the first time that Smith has bet the house on an immersive sim and come up trumps. That’s exactly what happened with Dishonored—the game that cemented Arkane’s reputation as the new guardian of this particular strand of RPG.
Speaking to The Game Business, Smith revealed that Dishonored was a ride or die project, a way out of a mire of fruitless contract work for other developers. “People would come tell us ‘Man, to keep the business alive, you better take some contracts. You need to be working on whatever you can get.’ And for a while we tried that, even though it felt wrong.”
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Despite some promising projects like a cancelled Half-Life 2 episode, Smith’s fears proved justified: “There was a point in time when Arkane was about to go under. I think we had four months of money left. We were working on Boom Blox with EA. We were pitching to Ubisoft. We had a couple of guys on a zombie shooter. We were farming people out left and right. We were on nine projects at once.”
Eventually, Arkane decided to stop simply taking on third-party projects just to survive and create what they wanted come hell or high water. “At some point, we realised this is not the way. We are here to do a very specific thing. Let’s focus on that, and let’s go under if that’s what is going to happen. Instead, the result was Dishonored, which was one of the big turnarounds of my career.”
This experience reinforced Smith’s belief that the best chance of succeeding in the games industry is to make what you’re truly passionate about. As such, Black Pony Immersive has already stated that it won’t chase trends—attempting which produced Arkane’s one true misfire Redfall—and ignore the fears of the wider industry that results in an aversion to creative risk.
Naturally, I can’t wait to see what Smith’s renewed commitment to immersive sims results in. Between this, New Blood’s ongoing development of Gloomwood and Fallen Aces, and the unnamed first-person RPG from WolfEye studios—founded by Arkane’s co-founder Raphaël Colantonio—we may finally be headed out of the ‘it’s so over’ phase of the immersive sim’s life-cycle.
