Several immersive sim heavyweights have founded a new studio to carry on the work they were doing in Dishonored before Arkane Austin was closed in 2024. Unveiling Black Pony Immersive, Harvey Smith and Ben Horne have a clear vision for what they want to accomplish.
Smith and Horne spoke about putting the team together, and the first game they're working on, in an interview with The Game Business.
"It feels like a sea of doom and gloom the last few years, so many of our colleagues suffering, developers falling left and right, and everybody else doing everything they can to reach out or help," Smith says.
"Even on the publisher side, nobody’s happy to see the business in the state that it is," he adds. Indeed, it's not been a strong generation for the industry. Layoffs are rampant, with Xbox restructuring heavily and letting go of thousands of staff across its game studios and business - there's not a lot of optimism around, at least in the AAA space.
Smith and Horne know this all too well. They found themselves out of jobs in 2024 following the sudden closure of Arkane's branch in Austin, Texas, despite the devs there producing multiple warmly received games. Gathering their resolve, they decided the best reaction was to remain defiant in their ambitions.
"It feels like to do something optimistic in the face of that is to be a dark horse," Smith explains. "We're going to fall back on what we love. We're going to work with the people we love. We're going to have fun doing it."
A number of Arkane alumni make up the Black Pony ensemble, including Ricardo Bare, who worked on the original Deus Ex and now serves as design director, worldbuilding director Karen Segars, and lead level designer Jeremy Catlin. These are all devs with a wealth of games experience, making the collective pedigree quite large, and they all have one goal - to make a bloody good first-person, single-player, immersive sim.
"We want to make immersive sims," Smith adds. "We want to make single-player, narrative-driven, first person games where you explore and solve problems creatively. Think Deus Ex, think Dishonored, that’s what we're doing."
The timing is miraculous, as genre heavyweight and Deus Ex lead Warren Spector just announced his retirement. Perhaps the industry is ready for the next generation of great immersive sims.
