Arkane Studios was started to make a sequel nobody else would. In 1999 Raphaël Colantonio set up a small company in Lyon to make first-person role-playing games like Ultima Underworld, the 1992 dungeon game from the team that became Looking Glass. It was, he later told Edge, a time “when all the RPG developers were folding, or about to fold”. Its rough first game won a cult following, its second was built on Valve’s Source engine, and its first game for Bethesda, Dishonored (2012), scored nine out of ten in Edge.
Not quite Ultima Underworld 3
Colantonio and his team, then four people, did not want a game merely inspired by Ultima Underworld: they wanted to make “an actual U3”, Edge reported in 2006. They approached Paul Neurath, who had founded Looking Glass. “Paul was very excited about it — but he had the IP rights, not the distribution rights,” Colantonio said. “So then we met with EA… and that’s where that story ends.”
What Arkane made instead was Arx Fatalis. PC Zone previewed it at the end of 2000 as a first-person RPG set in a frozen world “where all life, magical and otherwise, has been forced underground”, in the vein of System Shock 2 and Deus Ex, with spells cast by drawing shapes on the screen. No publisher had signed it yet. PC Gamer introduced the “French developers Arkane” the following spring. The game came out for the PC in 2002.
Computer Gaming World’s review in March 2003 began with everything against it: “The box is ugly. The name is dopey. It’s a blatant Ultima Underworld wannabe. It’s got a French development team. OK, that’s all true, but so are some other things.” The reviewer went on to call it “the most original RPG not named Morrowind released in 2002”. Colantonio himself admitted it had “a lot of rough edges and a lot of bugs”. The Xbox version, published by DreamCatcher in 2003, fared worse: Edge gave it four out of ten.
Source and Might and Magic
The Xbox version brought Arkane its next game. While demonstrating it at E3, Colantonio said, a visitor from Valve stopped to say he had liked Arx Fatalis, took the team to see the Half-Life 2 demo, and put them in touch about the Source engine. Valve let Arkane use it before Half-Life 2 was released. A Source demo caught the interest of Ubisoft, which had bought the Might and Magic series and suggested combining the two.
The result was Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (PC, 2006), a first-person fantasy game built around sword fighting, physics and magic, with a multiplayer mode developed separately at Kuju. “At the end of Arx we were nine people, and now we’re about 30, plus external contractors,” Colantonio told Edge in 2006. He had recruited the Thief designer Randy Smith and Half-Life 2’s art director Viktor Antonov as consultants, and had persuaded a respected author of Thief fan missions to give up his accounting job, sell his house and move his family from the United States to Lyon for a year of level design. Asked how, he said: “You just have to ask.”
ZeniMax and Dishonored
On 12 August 2010 ZeniMax Media, the owner of Bethesda, announced that it had bought Arkane. By then the studio had offices in Lyon and in Austin, Texas, and was led by Colantonio with Harvey Smith, the lead designer of Deus Ex. It had also worked on 2K Marin’s BioShock 2. “After 11 years of independent development,” Colantonio said, “we couldn’t think of a better publishing partner.”
Dishonored (2012), co-directed by Colantonio and Smith and published by Bethesda for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, was set in Dunwall, a plague-ridden city run on whale oil. Its hero, Corvo, could teleport short distances with a power called Blink, and every level offered several routes. Edge gave it nine out of ten and singled out its Chaos system, “with the city of Dunwall becoming more or less stable in relation to your bodycount”, so that a violent player faced more rats and better-defended strongholds.
Two studios
The two studios then made separate games. Arkane Lyon made Dishonored 2 (2016) and Deathloop (2021); Arkane Austin made Prey (2017). Colantonio stepped down as president in June 2017, after eighteen years. In 2021 Microsoft bought ZeniMax, and with it Arkane. Arkane Austin’s next game was the vampire shooter Redfall (2023), and in May 2024 Microsoft closed the Austin studio. A small team was allowed back to finish a last update, with an offline mode, which came out at the end of that month. Arkane Lyon continues.
The source code of Arx Fatalis
On 14 January 2011 Arkane released a final patch for Arx Fatalis, version 1.21, together with the source code of its engine under the GNU General Public License version 3, minus some proprietary components such as EAX sound. The game’s art and data were not included, so players still need a copy of the original game. Fans built on the code to make Arx Libertatis, a continued version of the engine, also under the GPL, which still needs the original game’s data.
Sources
- Edge issue 161, April 2006: Dark Messiah of Might and Magic feature (Colantonio on Arkane’s founding, Paul Neurath and EA, Arx Fatalis, Valve and Source, Ubisoft, the size of the studio, Randy Smith, Viktor Antonov and the Thief fan-mission author).
- PC Zone issue 96, December 2000, p. 25: preview of Arx Fatalis. PC Gamer (UK) issue 96, May 2001, p. 28: Arkane and Arx.
- Computer Gaming World issue 224, March 2003, p. 94: review of Arx Fatalis.
- Edge issue 132, January 2004: review of Arx Fatalis for Xbox (DreamCatcher Games; Arkane Studios). Edge issue 133, February 2004: review scores (Arx Fatalis, 4).
- Edge issue 170, Christmas 2006: review of Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (PC; Ubisoft; developer Arkane/Kuju; multiplayer developed at Kuju).
- Edge issue 247, December 2012, pp. 88–93: review of Dishonored (Bethesda Softworks; Arkane Studios; Xbox 360, PC, PS3) and interview with Harvey Smith and Raphaël Colantonio.
- ZeniMax Media press release, 12 August 2010, as reprinted by GameBanshee (web, secondary): founded 1999; Lyon and Austin; Colantonio and Smith; Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah, BioShock 2. http://www.gamebanshee.com/xyxd. Also bit-tech, 13 August 2010: Colantonio’s “11 years of independent development”. https://bit-tech.net/news/gaming/pc/arkane-studios-acquired-by-zenimax-media/1
- “Arkane’s president and co-founder resigns after 18 years”, Destructoid, June 2017, and “Arkane Studios boss resigns after launching Prey”, GamesBeat, June 2017 (web, secondary). https://destructoid.com/arkanes-president-and-co-founder-resigns-after-18-years
- “Tango Gameworks and Arkane Austin closed”, Siliconera, May 2024, and “Former Arkane leads say Xbox let them come in and finish Redfall’s final major update after being laid off”, Video Games Chronicle, 2024 (web, secondary). https://www.siliconera.com/tango-gameworks-and-arkane-austin-closed/
- Wikipedia, “Arkane Studios” (web, secondary): which studio made Dishonored 2, Prey, Deathloop and Redfall, and their years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkane_Studios
- Alice O’Connor, “Arx Fatalis Source Code Released”, Shacknews, 14 January 2011, and “Code source de Arx Fatalis libéré”, LinuxFr.org, 14 January 2011 (web, secondary): patch 1.21, the GPL version 3 licence and its exceptions, the assets left out. https://shacknews.com/article/67133/arx-fatalis-source-code-released
- Arx Libertatis project website (web): based on the released source code; GPL 3+; game data not included. https://arx-libertatis.org/