When Dishonored director Harvey Smith announced his new studio, co-founded with fellow Arkane alumnus Ben Horne, there was no doubt about the kind of games the team would be working on. Black Pony Immersive makes it pretty damn clear. Putting “immersive” right there in the name is a statement of intent, one born from his experiences at Arkane.
“About the name, it was important to us to say to people, ‘This is who we are,'” he tells us. “When Arkane was independent, very often people would come in and they would try to get us to work on some game. And it was not in our wheelhouse. People would say, ‘You’re going to go under by turning your nose up at this project, this is money. People are offering you money to do this DLC for this third-person action shooter.’ And we’d be like, ‘Yeah, but we don’t like those, we don’t know how to do them well, and we think that game is dumb.’ So we’re generally going to say no, and gamble the company on doing what we are known for.”
Of course, Arkane would go on to become the best known immersive sim studio. And that was because it stood its ground and kept working in that genre, despite the offers to work on projects outside of its wheelhouse.
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“There was a moment when we were pretty desperate,” he recalls, “and a bunch of people working on BioShock 2 said, ‘God, we’re in a tight spot. We need somebody to take on a bunch of levels. You know who’s out there? Arkane is out there.’ So we took Christophe Carrier, our level design director, who is really the wellspring from which a lot of that thinking at Arkane came from. We took him and a team, and we put them on BioShock 2. And that only happened because people associated us with that kind of game.”
Ultimately, though, after spending decades building this reputation, Arkane would eventually take a detour—the vampire-themed multiplayer shooter Redfall. “That was a game that did not come together,” says Smith, “and we never should have been working on a games-as-a-service game, to be honest.”
Redfall led to the closure of Arkane Austin, and thanks to the Xbox reset Arkane Lyon is now in a difficult position. French labour laws meant that Xbox couldn’t just massacre it like it’s already done with so many other studios, but it feels like it’s hanging on by a thread.
As an independent studio with such a clear creative direction, Black Pony Immersive will hopefully avoid this fate. “There are many ways to fail, many ways to succeed,” says Smith. “But specialising in what you love is not a bad path.”
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