The closure of Arkane Austin earlier this year came as a very unhappy surprise, felt keenly by fans of the immersive sim genre. But in a new interview with PC Gamer, Arkane founder Raphael Colantonio, who left the company in 2017, said that while the shutdown is sad, it also represents an opportunity for a renewal of the genre.
"It's sad, of course," Colantonio said. "They still had a lot of friends there, and I wanted to see our game going forever, for obvious reasons. But the company is [gone], but not the people. The people survive."
Colantonio cited Looking Glass Studios, who he described as "the originator of the immersive sim," which released groundbreaking games including Ultima Underworld (as Blue Sky Productions), System Shock, and Thief before closing its doors in 2000. Looking Glass helped inspire the foundation of Arkane, and some of its employees eventually joined the studio.
Black Isle Studios is another one: Its closure in 2003 was another sad loss, but "it's still going," he said, "because then you had Brian Fargo make his own company, you had Troika, you had Obsidian ... We still remember Black Isle as a great company in that genre, but then we still have their games."
He also noted that Arkane is still around in Lyon, and that people like himself, Harvey Smith, and Ricardo Bare are still on the scene too. Colantonio founded WolfEye Studios in 2019, and returned to the immersive sim genre with Weird West, a smaller-scale 2022 production that was very good.
"We're doing more with WolfEye," Colantonio said. "I'm sure they're going to do their own stuff as well. And so the spirit of the immersive sim, I think sometimes that's what you need—sometimes you need a renewal, you need a new impulse. And I think that's going to spawn more little immersive sim companies. So while [the Arkane Austin closure] is a sad event, I don't think it necessarily means that immersive sims are going to go away."
That's not to say Colantonio thinks the shutdown of Arkane Austin is a good thing. He wasn't surprised by Microsoft's 2021 acquisition of Bethesda, Arkane's parent company, but in hindsight he's not sure it was a good thing.
"I guess it was a good move for many people," he said. "That's the rule, though. When you sell to one of those huge, huge behemoths, you usually make a lot of money. So there were a lot of people that made a lot of money. And then at this point, you hand them the keys. And they might—you know, it's part of the deal."
WolfEye Studios is working on a brand new "first-person action RPG" that sounds very much like a return to Arkane's roots. It doesn't have a title yet, but Colantonio recently described it structurally as something of a mix of Fallout: New Vegas, Dishonored, and Prey. I'm already reaching for my wallet.
