Power Fantasies and the End of Arkane Austin

When Warren Spector was a producer at Origin Systems in the 1990s, he had a business model. “I would start up four projects, two internal and two external, and I’d kill two projects every year that weren’t going well,” he says in Jason Schreier’s book Press Start: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry. “I would tell people that’s what I was going to do. ‘Be one of the projects that’s going really well.’”

Victorious in Spector’s system were Ultima Underworld and System Shock, the forerunners of what became known as the immersive sim. Games in this genre present an obstacle and allow the player to surmount it in multiple ways: climb over it, blow it up, tell it to move, swim underneath it, whichever way they choose. Over time, the tools got more inventive: possess rats and squeeze through a sewer grate, hack a robot to destroy something, transform into a coffee cup and roll underneath an obstacle.

Spector repeated his approach for the 2000 title Deus Ex, still the apotheosis of the immersive sim, by constituting two design teams and pitting them in conflict, which he later called “probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.” In that contest, designer Harvey Smith triumphed; he headed up Deus Ex’s sequel and, in 2012, moved onto Dishonored, with the studio Arkane Austin. “Dishonored,” said Spector, “is the series that best captures the spirit of Deus Ex now.”

Arkane, which at one point operated out of studios in Lyon, France, as well as Austin, Texas, has spent most of its life iterating on the immersive sim, as has Smith, becoming the foremost developer in this genre. So it’s no surprise that Arkane Austin’s latest and last game, Redfall — a multiplayer vampire shooter either a conscious departure from the immersive sim or an attempt to graft it upon a more commercial business model — evidently performed poorly enough to shutter the studio earlier this year.

Immersive sims, despite their flexibility of approach, train players to be specialists. They can become a walking weapons platform, the queen of the shadows, the rat god who rides the wind. A studio of immersive sim experts can’t easily switch tracks and deliver a larger, more commercial title. But then, it’s not like they had a choice.