Arkane Studios: Ten Years of Development

Gamasutra has kicked up a four-page article about Arkane Studios’ ten-year history, during which founder Raphael Colantonio offers quite a bit of commentary about the development of Arx Fatalis, their contributions to BioShock 2, the cancellation of The Crossing, and what we should expect from their next title.

Lesson number one for those who would enter this industry: be willing to look like a fool. Colantonio’s willingness to risk a little pride led to working with the very people he most admired. He was and is a huge fan of Richard Garriott and the Ultima series. “Those older games totally inspired us,” he says, “and of course ION Storm with Deus Ex and Harvey.”

Harvey Smith joined Arkane Studios after working at Origin Systems, ION Storm, and Midway Games. Best known for his work on highly acclaimed games such as Deus Ex, Smith — now a partner at Arkane — shares Colantonio’s approach to game development.

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He left EA UK in 1997 to join a small studio in France that contracted for Atari. Two years later he started Arkane, which released Ultima Underworld-influenced first-person PC role-playing game Arx Fatalis in 2002.

“I think it was the most true game that we’ve worked on and done,” says Colantonio. “It was exactly what I wanted to do. There were too many bugs, I know that. But still I am very proud of it.” At a time when games were made by teams of 30 people or more, Arkane created Arx Fatalis with only nine people. “We sweated blood on that one.”

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It’s going that extra step to make sure the player has a compelling experience that Colantonio hopes separates Arkane from other studios. “We haven’t tried to go everywhere at the same time. We’ve always exposed the same message to the publishers and the customers in general — you know, we’re passionate and that’s what we like to do. We like to do first person games with depth. It doesn’t need to be dark. Usually it is, because that’s our taste.”

But depth is often invisible to publishers. “They don’t care about that,” says Colantonio. “They like quantifiable things like how many monsters you have. How many levels, how many weapons. They want to know if the graphics are better than other games. Do you have physics? All these kinds of things. They don’t ask whether you have emotions of moral choices in the game. They are not qualities that are recognized as selling points.”

Unfortunately, I haven’t been interested in any of their projects since Arx Fatalis. Hopefully their next “compelling” game will draw its inspiration from Ultima Underworld again.

Thanks, RPG Codex.