Black Isle Studios

» see blackisle.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

fallout 2 reached the turkish pc rpg fan tier around 2000-2001, when burned-cd copies started turning up at internet cafes alongside the half-life and counter-strike installs. it was already two or three years old by then. black isle studios was the small interplay division that had made it, alongside fallout 1 and planescape torment. the studio name on the box mattered to a tier of pc rpg fans who later followed obsidian wherever it went.

black isle was founded in 1996 as an internal division of interplay entertainment, named after the black isle peninsula in scotland near founder feargus urquhart's ancestral home. the studio's run was short but unusually dense. fallout shipped in october 1997 with the s.p.e.c.i.a.l. system that all subsequent fallouts would use. fallout 2 followed in october 1998. planescape torment in december 1999 turned the same infinity engine that bioware was using for baldur's gate into a text-heavy philosophy rpg with more written content than any other game of the era. the icewind dale games rounded out the late-nineties output.

on december 8 2003 interplay disbanded black isle. the studio had run out of runway. baldur's gate iii: the black hound and the original fallout 3 (codename van buren) were both canceled. feargus urquhart and most of the senior staff had already left earlier in 2003 to found obsidian entertainment. obsidian inherited the dna and most of the staff. interplay briefly revived the black isle name in august 2012 to crowdfund project v13, which never raised enough to ship and went quiet by early 2014.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually was ~

black isle was a publisher and producer label more than a single development team. fallout 1 and fallout 2 came from the internal black isle team in irvine, california. planescape torment came from a smaller sub-team led by chris avellone. the icewind dale games came from the same internal team but were built on bioware's infinity engine under license. the brand on the box meant heavy writing density and a tone that did not talk down to the player.

the writing was the actual differentiator. planescape torment in particular shipped with around a million words of script (the same word count as several long novels). it asked the player the title's question (what can change the nature of a man) and then took the answer seriously. this was not how american rpgs of the era usually worked.

~ the postmortem ~

interplay was bleeding cash through 2002 and 2003. the company had lost the dungeons and dragons license to atari and shipped baldur's gate dark alliance ii without a real successor lined up. when the december 2003 layoffs hit, black isle was the casualty. the rumored fallout 3 project, codename van buren, was several months from playable when it was shelved. the build leaked online in 2007 and has been a small modder fascination ever since.

~ the inheritance ~

obsidian entertainment inherited the writing dna and most of the staff. it shipped knights of the old republic ii in 2004, neverwinter nights 2 in 2006, fallout new vegas in 2010, and pillars of eternity in 2015, the last of which was a kickstarter return to the infinity engine aesthetic black isle had defined. bethesda owns the fallout series outright now and runs it in a different direction. the canonical isometric rpg lineage runs through obsidian and then through inxile entertainment under brian fargo, before both studios were acquired by microsoft in 2018. the line is intact, just no longer named black isle.

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