Microsoft’s closure of Arkane Austin in May 2024 left 96 developers out of work – among them studio head Harvey Smith, whose storied career spans Deus Ex, Dishonored, and Prey. Now, after a two-year quiet period, Smith is ready to reveal his next venture: Black Pony Immersive, a new studio co-founded with former Arkane colleague Ben Horne.
“Ben and I chose the worst time in history [to start a game studio],” Smith tells GamesIndustry.biz. “Because, you know, what else are you going to do?”
Horne, who served as production director on Redfall, echoes this sentiment: “Harvey and I spent a lot of time, in a really horrible environment for fundraising, talking to many different groups about how to raise money. We turned down some deals that just didn’t feel right. You know, ‘hey, if you guys are willing to maybe think about this NFT blockchain situation…’ As much [as we wanted] to get this off the ground, let’s try to do it the right way.”
While Smith has previously held director roles at Arkane and Midway, this is the first time he has set up his own company, something he says has always been a goal. “It just took a while to get there.”
So why now, in what Smith acknowledges is such a difficult game business landscape? “When things are going pretty well, your impetus to do something crazy is very low,” Smith explains. “It’s only when things explode that [you become willing to take the leap]. Like, you know what? We could do it better than that.”
If there’s any silver lining to be taken from Arkane Austin’s closure, Smith says, it’s this: “There’s so many lessons we’ve learned. We’ve endured these enormous hardships together.”
So what does “doing it better” actually look like? Part of the answer, Smith says, is minimising top-down interference: “We don’t have to seek much approval from anyone else, and that makes us very nimble.”
He also cites the importance of health-care benefits, even for a relatively small startup, “because this is the United States, where that’s not a given.” (Black Pony’s staff work remotely, but all of its full-time employees are based in the United States, Horne clarifies, with support from contractors and external developers around the world.)
More than anything, though, Smith is focused on the value of keeping a team together. “I don’t think the people closing the studios understand yet what they’ve lost,” he says.
Dark horses
Black Pony, which opened its doors last August and now has a headcount of 26, has been an opportunity to reunite some members of that old team – including those who’d since found jobs elsewhere. (Horne himself went to Meta-owned Twisted Pixel after Arkane’s closure, where he worked on Marvel’s Deadpool VR, but left in August 2025, a few months before it too was closed down by its parent company.)
Not everyone at Black Pony is an Arkane veteran. “There are some are completely new faces, people that I’ve respected and loved from the indie scene for many years – like our art director, who we’ll talk about eventually,” he says. “But many of these people, if you go on my Instagram, you’ll find pictures of us hanging out, after those last days at Arkane.”
Among the long-time collaborators on staff at Black Pony are Ricardo Bare, Smith’s creative partner since they first worked together as designers on Deus Ex, and Monte Martinez, formerly of Ion Storm, 2K Marin, and WolfEye, who Smith calls “the secret weapon of the immersive-sim world”.
Talking about Black Pony’s recruitment, Smith says, “We pulled people out of major companies, because they were unhappy where they were, or just because they were excited about the idea.”
Which brings us to the question of what that idea is, exactly. Smith won’t be drawn on details of the game these people have assembled to make, beyond saying that “we had the pitch before we had the company.” But there’s no mystery about what genre it’ll be in. The clue, after all, is right there in the name of the company: Black Pony Immersive.
Smith outlines the hallmarks of the games he loves most, and is best at making: “You’re slightly underpowered, but you have some creative tools. You have an exploration-based landscape, player-driven pace. Single-player, narrative-rich… Whether you call that an action RPG or FPS-RPG hybrid or an immersive sim, whatever.”
Looking back on his past games that have not gone so well, Smith reckons it comes down to straying from this magic formula. “When we’ve stayed in that lane, the results have been much better, and we get much closer to something that we truly love.”