The past half-decade has been a very busy one for inXile boss Brian Fargo. His studio successfully crowdfunded and then launched Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera, it's got The Bard's Tale 4 and Wasteland 3 in the works, and he also helped set up the investor-friendly, game-exclusive crowdfunding platform Fig. But his career stretches back a whole lot farther than that—Moby cites his first credit as an Apple II adventure called The Demon's Forge, and he very famously headed up the glory days of Interplay—and now, according to Eurogamer, he's starting to feel an urge to try something else.
"I love this industry, but I've been at this since 1981," Fargo said. "I've been at it with Ken and Roberta Williams, Trip Hawkins, the guys from Brøderbund—I look at my friends, they have a lot more spare time than I do. It's a very intense business. It's all encompassing. It seems like I should relax for a little bit."
The husband-and-wife Williams team, who co-founded Sierra Online (originally known as On-Line Systems) in 1979, retired from the industry around 2000, while Hawkins, who launched Electronic Arts in 1982, got out of the mainstream game development business a few years later. Brøderbund, which at one time was something of an industry heavyweight, went under in 1998. Fargo has stuck around through it all: He left Interplay in 2000 and founded inXile a couple of years later, which released games including the comedy action-RPG Bard's Tale, Super Slacker, Hei$t, and Hunted: The Demon's Forge. But it was the advent of Kickstarter, which enabled the development of Wasteland 2, that really put him and his studio back on the PC gaming map.
Wasteland 3 isn't expected to be out until 2019, so it's not as though Fargo is headed out the door tomorrow, and it leaves him plenty of time for second thoughts. But he said the company is in a good position to see him go, both from a personnel standpoint—"I've been training these people for years to make me obsolete," he said—and financially.
"We don't owe any external people any money. We don't have any debt. The other shares are with some of the employees of the company. So as long as it continues doing good product it should be fine," he said. He also acknowledged a certain downside to declaring that Wasteland 3 will be his final game: "It puts even more pressure on me to make damn sure that thing is stellar."
