I noticed there’s a lengthy interview [archive.org backup] with Feargus Urquhart, the president of Black Isle Studios, over on RPGVault. In it, Feargus talks about about the RPGs that Black Isle has developed and been involved with, including the Baldur’s Gate series, Fallout series, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment. Here’s a snippet:
Jonric: The three internal BIS products, Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale seem like pretty different types of games. To what extent do you think there’s a recognizable Black Isle style of RPG, and is it your goal to have a style?
Feargus Urquhart: It’s funny, but while I think there is a recognizable Black Isle style – I’m not really sure what it is. I think some of it is attention to detail, some of it is the way we do dialogue, and the rest of it is our creative process. As for us generating a universal Black Isle style, I’m not sure if we will ever try to have everything become a system. We have rules for the way dialogue is written, the ways areas are written up, and how experience is given in our games – but I don’t think we try to define it more than that. It is much like building a building – I would suppose. We have the type of concrete and re-bar that we like to use and our own methods for using it, but the building could be anything when it is finished being built.
As the original source is unavailable, we’ve replicated the interview here for posterity’s sake:
Black Isle Studios Interview, Part 1
August 31, 2001
In 1997, the RPG division of Interplay released a relatively unheralded game that eschewed the realm of fantasy in favor of a moody post nuclear setting. The CRPG market was still very much in the doldrums, but Fallout won unanimous acclaim, garnering innumerable awards as the best RPG and even the best game of the year. It also proved to be the first in a remarkable succession of quality titles. Since then, the division, now known as Black Isle Studios, has developed Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale plus the latter’s Heart of Winter expansion pack and the Trials of the Luremaster downloadable dungeon set. In addition, it has published BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate and Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn along with their respective expansion packs, Tales of the Sword Coast and Throne of Bhaal.
In terms of quality RPGs during this period, Black Isle has been associated with far more than any other publisher. This is also true of the man who has been at the helm the entire time, Feargus Urquhart, the long-time Division Director who received the shiny new title of Black Isle Studios President earlier this year in recognition of his work. We’ve had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Feargus on a number of occasions, but it has been well over two years since we last did so for publication. Recently however, he was kind enough to make time in his busy schedule for this very interesting Black Isle Studios Interview, Part 1in which he talks about the formation of Black Isle, his role there and the division’s exceptional track record over the past few years.
Jonric: What were the circumstances behind the formation of the RPG division within Interplay, especially at a time when the genre was at a low ebb in the market? What was your involvement at that time, and what led to your becoming the Division Director? And when it actually adopt the Black Isle name?
Feargus Urquhart: There were a number of things that all came together to have RPGs become a larger focus at Interplay, which in turn spawned a new division to produce and develop them. Chiefly amongst these reasons was that Interplay was founded on some of the best-known RPGs of the ’80s, which was in no small part because of Brian Fargo’s love of the genre. Coupled with the fact that we started talking with TSR about acquiring the D&D; licenses of Forgotten Realms and Planescape, and the long time development of Stonekeep, Interplay felt that a whole division should be dedicated to RPGs. So officially, the division has its roots back to 1994, and became more official in 1995 under the Dragonplay name.
However, in early 1996, the first division director, Mark O’Greene, left Interplay. I was then promoted to the position in April of 1996. It was sometime that year that we started searching for a name. After going through Digital Anvil, Monolith – both taken, and other wacky names like 12 Gauge and Colostomy Bag Food Fight (it was really on a list someone turned in to me) – we settled on Black Isle. The story is more complicated than that and involves some nasty e-mails and shouting matches – but I won’t go into all of that. 🙂 So, officially, we launched Black Isle in August of 1998, and the first title to bear the Black Isle name was Fallout 2.
Jonric: When you became Division Director, what did you see as your biggest and most immediate challenges?
Feargus Urquhart: Well, when I took over, my first challenge, as I saw it, was to figure out how 60 people were going to make eight internal products and manage about four external products. At first, I tried to keep everything going, but realized later in 1996 that 60 people just couldn’t do that many projects. So, we hired some people and consolidated products throughout the later parts of 1996 and early 1997. It ended up that we then had Planescape: Torment, Fallout 1, Dragon Dice, Descent to Undermountain, Stonekeep 2, and Red Asphalt in development in early 1997. Some of those were not necessarily my choice of projects to do; however, they had started before I took over the division, so they needed to be finished.
Jonric: Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, were there other significant challenges in the early phase? And on the other side of the coin, was there anything that went better or smoother than expected?
Feargus Urquhart: What turned out to be my largest challenge was that I knew absolutely nothing about managing a division, and barely enough about producing. At the time, I had not really produced a full internal product. I had a fair amount of external production experience (producing titles that are developed by developers outside of Interplay like BioWare), but I was lacking the internal development side of things. So, a lot of the early growing pains of the division were due to my inexperience and ignorance. Luckily, Interplay is pretty forgiving and I was allowed to make enough mistakes, so that I could learn enough to get things moving forward.
The best decision I did make in those early days was to immediately start ramping up the Fallout 1 project, so that they could actually ship that decade. When I first took over the division, there were only about eight people working on the project – which I worked to ramp up to over 20 closer to launch. This actually turned out to be one of the things that went smoother than I thought. Interplay gave me a lot of freedom, as they do today, to let me move people around within the division to solve problems and get things moving forward.
Jonric: As far as the RPG division’s early products, did you start work on anything else before or around the same time as Fallout?
Feargus Urquhart: Fallout started in 1994 (or there about), so there weren’t many things that were started before it. Plus, many of the things that were started around that time were cancelled and never came out.
Jonric: How did Fallout actually come to be? What led to the decision to develop a serious RPG, especially a non-fantasy one, at a time when the entire genre was in a rather comatose state?
Feargus Urquhart: My recollections of the actual conception of Fallout are somewhat fuzzy. I was working on drastically different things at the time, but I did talk with Tim Cain (producer of Fallout) from time to time, so I can give a vague rendition. After Tim had finished his last game, Rags to Riches, and all the foreign versions he was given sometime to explore and come up with another project. At first, he was playing around with a voxel engine that had something to do with shooting jeeps I think, but then the idea came up for him to develop an RPG. I think it was spawned by Brian Fargo asking him to think about using a brand – which ended up being GURPs. Now, as to why we decided to do an RPG – that’s a good question. I don’t think anyone thought that it was the wrong thing to do.
Jonric: The game has the reputation of being developed outside of the media spotlight and of not getting Interplay management’s full attention. To what extent is this accurate, and in what ways did this help or hinder the final product?
Feargus Urquhart: In a lot of ways, that is an accurate way of looking at probably most of the time that Fallout was in development. Since RPGs were not necessarily selling a lot of units, the Interplay marketing and sales force were not really interested in the title a great deal. Interplay was also a little different back in those days, where development was much more a bunch of little groups all vying for the same resources. There was not a great deal of central organization of development, which led to titles being made that not a whole lot of other people at Interplay knew about.
As for if this sort of “skunkworks” type of development helped or hindered the development of Fallout – I think it did both. It helped a great deal in the beginning, because the team had enough support and time to really create a design that they wanted to implement. However, when the team needed to ramp up, it needed to be seen as a frontline Interplay product. Since it was still in the background to an extent, it probably did not get the resources it needed, when it needed them. It also meant that Interplay may not have really gotten behind the product early enough to get the press and the consumers really excited.
Jonric: The sequel, Fallout 2 was the first release to carry the Black Isle name. What were your main goals for this game? And in retrospect, how well did you accomplish them?
Feargus Urquhart: Our main goals for the game were to expand upon things in Fallout like more control over Companions (equipping their items and controlling their combat AI to an extent), a larger world, and the infamous car. We actually accomplished all of the goals we put together and did it within a couple weeks of the time we set out for ourselves a year earlier.
Now, how well we accomplished them is a different matter. The first half of 1998 was not a great time for Interplay, and I knew that it was going to be very important for us to get the game out in October. So, I pushed the team very hard – too hard in fact. We lost a number of good people from Black Isle after Fallout 2 – mostly because of how I pushed the team. Another result of this was that we released a product that had far too many bugs in it. I sincerely thought it was in better shape when we released it, but we (especially me) were moving so fast that I think we didn’t slow down enough to really make sure that we had crossed all our Ts and dotted all of our Is. In the end, I think we developed a great game that a whole bunch of people have enjoyed. However, it was too buggy, and I think that hurt the division’s reputation early on.
Jonric: In terms of sales, both Fallout titles are usually thought of as modest hits. To what extent is this accurate, and do you have any thoughts as to why neither became a bigger hit?
Feargus Urquhart: I would say that modest hits is the best way to explain how they have performed commercially. They have definitely done well, but certainly have not sold the numbers of the Baldur’s Gate series. In some ways, I think that the sales of the original Fallout were hindered because it was such a surprise to the gaming public. A lot of people say that Fallout (along with Diablo) really helped bring back the RPG genre in 1997. However, there were things about the game that also hindered its sales. I think that it being turn-based and not real-time, post nuclear and not fantasy, and single-player only helped “cap” the number of people that would be interested in buying it. Which is ironic, because it is the turn-based combat and the post nuclear setting that really defined what the Fallout series was all about.
Jonric: What were the circumstances surrounding Interplay’s decision to contract BioWare to develop an RPG set in the Forgotten Realms rather than making it internally?
Feargus Urquhart: Actually at the time, I was still just a producer who was working on Shattered Steel with BioWare. I was really impressed with their final demo of Battleground Infinity and worked with the executives of Interplay to get them signed up to do it. At the time, I was not going to be involved with it any more than that. As it turned out Brian Fargo was already thinking of having me run the RPG Division at the time, so I did end up being involved with it. As for the reasons why I thought it should be signed up – basically I thought it was a chance for us to use the AD&D; license the way it was supposed to be used – something we were not doing internally. And since at the time I did not have any control over what the division did internally, I felt that BioWare was in a unique position to use the technology that they were developing to make a new series of Gold Box games – the way I felt that Interplay should have been capitalizing on the TSR license.
Jonric: When Baldur’s Gate was released in late 1998, it became a breakout title for the entire genre. When did you first realize it would be a monster hit, and what would you list as the main factors that led to it becoming one?
Feargus Urquhart: Well, the day we went to duplication on CD 1 was the day of Interplay’s annual Christmas party. Pretty much all Chris Parker (the producer on Baldur’s Gate) and I were thinking about was getting really drunk. 🙂 And even through the first couple weeks of January, we had no idea that it was doing so well. We knew that we had sold in around 125K units in the US – and we just hoped that we could sell through all of those. We knew the game was good, but that is never enough to make a game a hit. As it turned out, all of those units pretty much sold through in the first six weeks, and it was doing even better in Europe.
As for why it did so well – there are probably about three hundred reasons. However, the key ones were that it was the first exceptional D&D; game in a long time, BioWare did an outstanding job in making the game and talking about it online, it had a multi-player component, and the player could pause and issue orders while the game was paused. In other words, BioWare and Interplay were able to excite everybody about the game because of the license, and then the game delivered on all of those promises.
Jonric: Black Isle followed up about a year later with Planescape: Torment, which won tremendous critical acclaim but sold a relatively modest number of copies. To what do you attribute this?
Feargus Urquhart: I felt that the modest sales of Torment were a reflection on the way the game was marketed, the decision to make it single-player only, and the very poor preview version that we released to the gaming press. Of those, I think that the single-player nature of the game could have been easily overcome if we could have done a better job of representing the product to the public and to the press.
A big part of that was the preview that we released. The biggest thing that the gaming press said about the final version was that they were totally surprised by the game that it had become – a GIGANTIC mistake on our part. It meant that the preview version of the game was a very different experience for them, and they were surprised by the final version. I think that while being called “This Year’s Surprise Hit!” or “The Sleeper Hit of the Summer” can be turned to your favor when it is said about a movie – I think that in games something like this is a real sign that things weren’t done right.
Jonric: In Black Isle’s own foray into the Forgotten Realms, Icewind Dale, you made a dungeon crawl with a pretty linear plot emphasizing combat and treasure-hunting. Why did you go in this direction instead of making an epic more like the Baldur’s Gate games, or using a stronger story emphasis like Planescape: Torment?
Feargus Urquhart: We wanted to use the Infinity Engine again on a game and needed to come up with a game concept that felt different than Baldur’s Gate and Torment. So, we thought back to our days of playing pen and paper D&D; and the early modules like Tomb of Horrors. This gave us a direction that was distinctly different than that of Torment and Baldur’s Gate, which would mean that people would not feel like they were just playing those games again in a different area of the Forgotten Realms.
Jonric: The three internal BIS products, Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale seem like pretty different types of games. To what extent do you think there’s a recognizable Black Isle style of RPG, and is it your goal to have a style?
Feargus Urquhart: It’s funny, but while I think there is a recognizable Black Isle style – I’m not really sure what it is. I think some of it is attention to detail, some of it is the way we do dialogue, and the rest of it is our creative process. As for us generating a universal Black Isle style, I’m not sure if we will ever try to have everything become a system. We have rules for the way dialogue is written, the ways areas are written up, and how experience is given in our games – but I don’t think we try to define it more than that. It is much like building a building – I would suppose. We have the type of concrete and re-bar that we like to use and our own methods for using it, but the building could be anything when it is finished being built.
While Black Isle’s unbroken string of quality titles over the past few years obviously provided a great deal to talk about, we were also interested to discuss some other topics and to find out how he feels about the RPG genre in general. Luckily, we’ve been able to obtain Feargus’ agreement to talk again. As a result, we thank him for his time and for very interesting answers at this time, and we look forward to his return for Part 2 of this interview in the not too distant future.
Related Links
Heart of Winter: Trials Of The Luremaster Review July 20, 2001
Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal Review June 27, 2001
Icewind Dale: Heart Of Winter Review February 21, 2001
Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows Of Amn Special Report December 7, 2000
Icewind Dale Special Report August 3, 2000
Planescape: Torment Special Report, Part 2 February 14, 2000
Planescape: Torment Special Report, Part 1 February 11, 2000
Baldur’s Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast Review July 2, 1999
Feargus Urquhart (Black Isle) Mini-Interview #2 April 26, 1999
Feargus Urquhart (Black Isle) Mini-Interview April 23, 1999
Baldur’s Gate Review February 11, 1999
Fallout 2 Review December 3, 1998
Interplay ’98 Interview, Part 2 June11, 1998
Interplay ’98 Interview, Part 1 May 13, 1998
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