// KOTAKU — GAMING
Harvey Smith Explains What Most Games Are Missing And Why He’s Still Making Them: ‘It’s An Act Of Rebellion To Try To Do Something Hopeful In Times Like This’
Black Pony ImmersiveDishonoredHarvey SmithinterviewSystem Shock
Last month, Dishonored creator Harvey Smith and Arkane’s former production director Ben Horne announced that they had established a new studio, Black Pony Immersive, with the sole purpose of creating a new immersive sim in the lineage of Deus Ex, Thief, Prey, and System Shock. Insistent on learning more about how the studio came to be and its ambitions for the future, we sat down with Smith and Horne to talk about defying the odds in a precarious gaming industry, the rebellious act of developing in a genre that publishers are afraid to touch, and the deliciousness of mystery. Oh, and what it’s like when you have a limited budget for chairs.
When Arkane Austin was closed by Microsoft in 2024, Harvey Smith and Ben Horne were both beyond devastated. But even among the carnage and sadness, they knew what they were going to do next. Both were of a single mind. In the aftermath of the awful news, Horne came to Smith and said, “You know what we should do?”
“I think I’m going to complete your sentence for you,” Smith replied at the time. “What if we start a studio?”
It wouldn’t be until a year later that Black Pony Immersive was officially formed, and then another year before the studio was unveiled to the public. So what took place in that first year?
“Just talking to every person that we thought might be able to fund us,” says Harvey Smith. “You talk to VCs and they start talking about NFTs or AI, and we’re like, ‘Guys, best of luck.’ You talk to some and they’re like, ‘No, no, we’re not into that at all. We like what you’re about, the fundamentals of your game, but our people are hoping to see, uh, times one thousand return within two years.’”
“You hear a lot of ‘no’s from people,” adds Horne. People asked them, are you guys leveraging any bleeding-edge technology? Or, are we going to get a return on investment super-quickly? “It really sharpened our focus around who are the right partners for us. Not just, ‘how can we get off the ground as quickly as possible?’, which in our hearts is what we wanted to do. We just burned to make this thing, to make this kind of game with these people. But we learned so much about what really matters to us, what we’re willing to accept.”
Eventually, something (and we don’t know what) worked out, leading to Black Pony Immersive receiving enough funding to establish a 26-person studio. “Pretty much no-strings-attached,” adds Smith. “We’re just doing what we think is right every day.”
Of course, this is a far tighter budget than either had been used to after many years as a subsidiary of Bethesda, which is owned by Microsoft. “The downside is you don’t have endless money,” explains Smith. “If you need more money or more people or better chairs, you can’t just snap your fingers and do that. We don’t have any of that, we’re fully remote.” Smith then gestures to the lack of any furniture beneath him. “Uh, I’m standing up.”
“We’re a scrappy little team,” Smith continues, “and we hope to pull off what Looking Glass did, or what Origin did, or what Ion Storm did, or what Arkane and Raphael [Colantonio] certainly did.”