Raphaël Colantonio set up Arkane Studios to make a sequel. He and his team, then four people, wanted to make “an actual U3”, a third Ultima Underworld, and went to Paul Neurath, who had founded Looking Glass, to ask for it. “Paul was very excited about it — but he had the IP rights, not the distribution rights,” Colantonio told Edge. “So then we met with EA… and that’s where that story ends.” Arkane made its own game instead, and over the next 18 years Colantonio built it into the studio behind Dishonored and Prey, games that kept Looking Glass’s kind of first-person game alive for a big audience.
Fast facts
- Nationality: French.
- Founded: Arkane Studios, Lyon, 1999; president until June 2017.
- Games at Arkane: Arx Fatalis (2002), Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (2006), Dishonored (2012, co-creative director with Harvey Smith), Prey (2017, creative director).
- Since 2019: WolfEye Studios, with Julien Roby; Weird West (2022).
From Ultima fan to EA
Colantonio fell in love with Ultima when he was nine, Edge reported in 2006, and he was always “more interested in American RPGs than French games”. That taste got him his first job. According to Gamasutra’s 2009 profile of the studio, he entered a magazine contest by answering questions about Ultima, around the time of his compulsory military service, and ended up as the eighth employee of Electronic Arts in France, setting up its IT and customer support. He left EA, by then working for its British arm, in 1997 to join a small French studio, and two years later started his own.
Arkane
Arkane began in Lyon in 1999, “when all the RPG developers were folding, or about to fold”, as Colantonio put it. Its first game, Arx Fatalis (2002), was a first-person RPG in a frozen world forced underground, made by nine people. It was rough, and Colantonio admitted to “a lot of rough edges and a lot of bugs”, but it found a following. “I think it was the most true game that we’ve worked on and done,” he told Gamasutra in 2009. “It was exactly what I wanted to do.” The Arkane Studios entry follows the studio from there: a meeting with Valve at E3, the Source engine, and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic for Ubisoft.
By the time of Dark Messiah Arkane had about 30 people, and Colantonio had become good at recruiting. He brought in the Thief designer Randy Smith and Half-Life 2’s art director Viktor Antonov as consultants, and persuaded a well-known author of Thief fan missions to give up his accounting job and move his family from the United States to Lyon for a year. “You just have to ask,” he told Edge. He also explained what he was aiming for:
My ideal RPG would be almost like dreaming — I’m grabbing a sword, making my decisions, the world is responding to what I do — not saying: ‘OK, I’m trying to open the door, so throw your dice and tell me if it opens’.
“If the player can find some way to surprise us,” he added, “then we’ve won.”
Lyon and Austin
In 2005 Arkane opened a second studio in Austin, Texas. By 2010 Colantonio, as chief executive and game director, was co-directing Arkane’s next game with Harvey Smith, the lead designer of Deus Ex. The two offices were linked by video-conferencing carts left switched on beside people’s desks all day. Smith told Edge in 2010 that he and Colantonio had both been in games for about 16 years, that Ultima Underworld was their favourite game, and that Thief, System Shock and Deus Ex had formed their values. “We hire people that share this religion!” Colantonio said.
ZeniMax Media, the owner of Bethesda, bought Arkane in 2010. Dishonored (2012), co-directed by Colantonio and Smith, was set in the plague-ridden whaling city of Dunwall and let the player reach every target by several routes, with or without killing. Edge gave it nine out of ten. Colantonio explained its Chaos system: the more the player kills, the darker the story becomes. “If things are more chaotic, it makes you think like life is cheap, there are more betrayals and more bad outcomes.” Making the game work for both violent and peaceful players, he said, was like making “two or three” games at once.
At Arkane Austin, Colantonio was creative director of Prey (2017), with Ricardo Bare as lead designer. It was his last game at the studio.
WolfEye
In June 2017 Colantonio stepped down as Arkane’s president after 18 years. “It is time for me to step out to spend some time with my son and reflect on what is important to me and my future,” he said, and called himself “Arkane Studios’ biggest champion”.
In November 2019 he and Julien Roby, who had worked with him at Arkane for just over a decade, announced WolfEye Studios. It had no central office and would make smaller independent games rather than big-budget ones. “The world has changed since 1999 when I started Arkane Studios,” Colantonio said. “The market has changed, our tastes and desires too. I’m not the same person that I was back then, but there is one thing that hasn’t changed: I want to create a game that is very dear to me and my friends at WolfEye.”
That game was Weird West (2022), published by Devolver Digital: a top-down action RPG set in a supernatural American frontier, played as five different characters in turn, with several ways through each fight: by stealth, with a posse of hired guns, or by using the scenery. Colantonio also made music for it. With the singer Ava Gore, as Weird Wolves, he wrote songs for the soundtrack, which Wireframe called “the perfect musical accompaniment for the game’s pulpy, eerie vibes”. The same review was hard on the rest of the game, though: it found the combat crude and the side quests repetitive, and gave it 55%.
Sources
- Edge issue 161, April 2006: Dark Messiah of Might and Magic feature (Arkane’s founding in 1999; the four-strong team and “an actual U3”; Paul Neurath and EA; Arx Fatalis’s bugs; nine people at the end of Arx and about 30 on Dark Messiah; Randy Smith, Viktor Antonov and the fan-mission author; “You just have to ask”; his ideal RPG; “If the player can find some way to surprise us”).
- Edge issue 165, August 2006: feature on French development (Colantonio and Ultima at nine; American RPGs).
- Jessica Maguire, “From New To Arkane: Ten Years Of Development”, Gamasutra, 10 December 2009 (web, secondary): the Ultima contest; the eighth employee of EA in France; leaving EA UK in 1997; Arx Fatalis with nine people; his quotation on Arx. https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/from-new-to-arkane-ten-years-of-development
- Edge issue 211, February 2010, p. 129: Arkane in Lyon and Austin (the Austin studio founded in 2005; Colantonio as CEO and game director, Harvey Smith as co-game director; video conferencing; Ultima Underworld and their values; “this religion”).
- Edge issue 231, September 2011, and issue 247, December 2012: Dishonored (the Chaos quotation; “two or three” games; nine out of ten), as cited in the Dishonored entry. Edge issue 238, March 2012: Colantonio and Smith as co-creative directors.
- ZeniMax Media press release, 12 August 2010, as cited in the Arkane Studios entry.
- Bethesda.net, “Crafting the Story of Prey”, 25 April 2017 (web): Raphaël Colantonio, creative director; Ricardo Bare, lead designer. https://bethesda.net/en-AU/news/crafting-the-story-of-prey
- Mallory Locklear, “‘Dishonored’ studio co-founder steps down after 18 years”, Engadget, 27 June 2017 (web, secondary): Colantonio’s statement. https://www.engadget.com/2017-06-27-dishonored-studio-co-founder-steps-down.html
- Wireframe issue 28, November 2019, p. 14: news of WolfEye Studios (Colantonio and Julien Roby; remote, indie; his quotation, from Gamasutra).
- Wireframe issue 63, May 2022, p. 98: Weird West review (WolfEye Studios; Devolver Digital; £30.99; five characters; the ways to fight; 55%; Colantonio and Ava Gore as Weird Wolves).
- Wikipedia, “Raphaël Colantonio” (web, secondary): Weird West’s release in March 2022; his music under the name Weird Wolves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapha%C3%ABl_Colantonio