Code Like It's 198x

Black Isle Studios

Interplay's role-playing division

Companies & StudiosSource-checked

Black Isle Studios was the division Interplay set up in Irvine, California, in 1996 to make role-playing games and nothing else. Under Feargus Urquhart it made Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment and the Icewind Dale games, and put its name on BioWare's Baldur's Gate games as publisher. Interplay's debts closed it in December 2003, with a third Fallout unfinished; its staff went on to Obsidian Entertainment and other studios.

“How do you explain your incredible success the last few years?” Computer Gaming World asked Feargus Urquhart in November 2000. By then Interplay’s role-playing division had made or published Fallout 2, Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale in three years, and was about to release Baldur’s Gate II. Urquhart’s answer was organisation: in 1996 Interplay had split its development into divisions, and “with the founding of the Black Isle division, we were able to focus on making RPGs and only RPGs”. PC Gamer later judged that the studio “utterly dominated the RPG genre for almost five years”. Three years after that interview it was gone.

Fast facts

  • Parent: Interplay, Irvine, California.
  • Set up: 1996, as Interplay’s role-playing division.
  • Division director: Feargus Urquhart, until he left in 2003.
  • Developed: Fallout 2 (1998), Planescape: Torment (1999), Icewind Dale (2000) and its sequel, Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance II (2004).
  • Published: BioWare’s Baldur’s Gate (1998) and Baldur’s Gate II (2000), and games by other developers.
  • Closed: December 2003, when Interplay laid off its staff.

Fallout and the new label

Interplay had made role-playing games since The Bard’s Tale and Wasteland in the 1980s, but by the mid-1990s, PC Gamer’s Desslock wrote, it had “lost its way”, and a reorganisation “created its Black Isle Studios division to focus on RPG development”. The programmer Dan Spitzley told Retro Gamer that “Black Isle didn’t exist yet” when he joined Interplay, and that Urquhart was head of the “then-fledgling” division when he offered him the lead programmer’s job on Planescape: Torment.

Fallout (1997) was developed and published by Interplay and sold under Interplay’s name. Urquhart later counted its team among Black Isle’s staff: “after Fallout”, he said, a number of Black Isle employees left for Troika Games, founded by key members of the Fallout team (see Tim Cain). The Black Isle name went on the box with Fallout 2, advertised in December 1998 as a Black Isle Studios production, a year after the first game.

The Infinity Engine games

The partnership that made the name came from outside. Interplay published Baldur’s Gate (1998), developed by BioWare in Edmonton, under the Black Isle label, and its success, more than a million copies, gave Black Isle an engine as well as a hit. Urquhart told Computer Gaming World that the studio had “been very lucky in our relationship with BioWare, in that we’ve been able to work very closely with them and with the engine they created for the original Baldur’s Gate, the BioWare Infinity Engine”. His other explanation was restraint: the studio had been “relatively careful about the technological scope of our products”, putting its effort into content “in engines that are as new as possible—but are not on the bleeding edge”.

The first Black Isle game on that engine was Planescape: Torment (1999). Interplay held a licence for TSR’s Planescape setting that it had not used, and Chris Avellone, a writer and designer who had been hired into the new division, said that at his interview he had been asked how he would begin a Planescape game: “I’d start with the player waking from the dead in the Mortuary.” That is how the finished game opens. Computer Gaming World’s Thierry Nguyen called it “half game, half mytho-poetic meditation” and “a role-playing game without peer”: the player’s alignment was set by what the character did, not chosen at the start, and statistics such as intelligence changed what could be said in conversations.

Icewind Dale (2000) used the same engine for an adventure in the frozen north of the Forgotten Realms, starting in the Ten Towns. There were no ready-made heroes: the player created the whole party from scratch, and David Ogden Stiers narrated. Computer Gaming World‘s reviewer called it “a cup of refreshingly cold ice water in the vast desert of the RPG genre”. An expansion, Heart of Winter, followed in 2001, and Icewind Dale II in 2002. On consoles, the Black Isle label went on Snowblind Studios’ Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance (2001), and the division developed its sequel itself.

Decline

Black Isle’s games sold, but Interplay did not. PC Gamer traced the decline through Interplay’s debts: expensive 3D technology licensed for games that were cancelled, including Stonekeep 2 and Torn; the loss of the publishing rights to BioWare’s Neverwinter Nights, which Black Isle had been due to publish; and a new Dungeons & Dragons game shelved after months of work. Fallout 3, code-named Van Buren, had been in sporadic development since 1999. Urquhart and several senior developers left in 2003 to found Obsidian Entertainment, and in November J. E. Sawyer, lead designer of the Icewind Dale games and reportedly of Van Buren, resigned. Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader (2003), a Black Isle-published role-playing game developed by Reflexive Entertainment, was the division’s only PC release that year. Computer Gaming World reviewed it harshly and wrote that “Black Isle Studios, as we knew it, is done”.

In December 2003 Interplay laid off the whole division. Computer Gaming World reported that members of Black Isle “said the entire Black Isle staff has been laid off and the division has been dissolved”, while it was working on Fallout 3; an anonymous source told the magazine that Interplay was likely to sell the Fallout licence.

Later history

Black Isle’s people carried on elsewhere. Obsidian made Fallout: New Vegas (2010) for Bethesda Softworks, which had taken over the series (see Fallout). Troika, founded earlier by Fallout‘s developers, made Arcanum and The Temple of Elemental Evil. When it became clear that Black Isle would never make Fallout 3, Edge noted, a 208-page “Fallout Bible” of the series’ background was released. Interplay revived the Black Isle name in 2012 for a new role-playing project, Project V13, but its crowdfunding campaign did not raise enough to make the game.

Sources

  • Computer Gaming World issue 196, November 2000, BioWare cover feature, interview with Feargus Urquhart, Division Director for Black Isle Studios: the division of development from 1996, “RPGs and only RPGs”, the departures to Troika after Fallout, BioWare and the Infinity Engine, technological scope; Baldur’s Gate II advertising with the Black Isle Studios trademark.
  • Computer Gaming World issue 173, December 1998, p. 61: Fallout 2 advertised as a Black Isle Studios production.
  • Retro Gamer issue 113, April 2013, pp. 34–37, “The making of Planescape: Torment”: Irvine, the new RPG division, Urquhart as head of the “then-fledgling” division, Dan Spitzley, Chris Avellone’s interview and the Mortuary, the unused Planescape licence.
  • Computer Gaming World issue 188, March 2000, Thierry Nguyen, Planescape: Torment review.
  • Computer Gaming World issue 195, October 2000, Icewind Dale review: developer Black Isle, the Ten Towns, party creation, David Ogden Stiers, “a cup of refreshingly cold ice water”. Issue 203, June 2001: Heart of Winter review.
  • Edge issue 106, January 2002: Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance on PS2 under the Black Isle Studios name. Edge issue 134, March 2004: Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance II, developed by Black Isle.
  • Computer Gaming World issue 232, November 2003: Lionheart, “Reflexive’s RPG”, and “Black Isle Studios, as we knew it, is done”.
  • PC Gamer (US) issue 119, January 2004, news: J. E. Sawyer’s resignation in November and Van Buren; Urquhart and others leaving to found Obsidian.
  • PC Gamer (US) issue 120, February 2004, p. 104, Desslock, “Alternate Lives”: Interplay’s reorganisation, “utterly dominated the RPG genre for almost five years”, the cancelled 3D projects, Neverwinter Nights, the shelved D&D game, Fallout 3 since 1999, Lionheart, Obsidian and Troika, the closure in December.
  • Computer Gaming World issue 236, March 2004, p. 34, news: the layoffs and the Fallout licence.
  • Edge issue 213, April 2010, “Time Extend: Fallout”: the Fallout Bible.
  • Hyper issue 139, May 2005, pp. 39–41, Fallout retrospective: Van Buren; Obsidian and Troika employing former Black Isle staff.
  • Edge issue 217, August 2010, p. 42: Fallout: New Vegas, developed by Obsidian for Bethesda.
  • Wikipedia, “Black Isle Studios” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): the layoffs on 8 December 2003; Icewind Dale II (2002); Snowblind as developer of Dark Alliance; Reflexive as developer of Lionheart; the 2012 revival and Project V13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Isle_Studios

See also

Checked. Verified against primary sources and signed off by a person.