



It is 2012. Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith are a little reserved, talking about their pasts. They don't think they are all that interesting, and some of their history still rankles.

Talking about their game, Dishonored, they are more enthusiastic, but just by a little. They're used to talking to people who don't understand what they're trying to do. They aren't salesmen of their particular niche; they're artists.

Talking about their future with Bethesda, however, they are positively glowing. They can't help themselves. They sound like two men who have won the lottery.

Colantonio has been meeting with Bethesda for years, in a series of missed chances and crossed connections that left him feeling like it was never going to happen. The first meeting was in 1999, for Arx Fatalis. Colantonio met with Todd Vaughn, VP of development for Bethesda. Colantonio showed Vaughn the demo. Vaughn liked it, then disappeared. In 2002, Colantonio showed Vaughn the demo of Arx Fatalis 2, which would become Dark Messiah. Vaughn liked the game, but again, Bethesda did not pull the trigger. They reached out to Colantonio just five days after Arkane decided to do the deal with Ubisoft, but by then it was too late.

Finally, in 2007, Vaughn came clean.

"He invites us, as we were doing The Crossing, to have a meeting to see if there was any way [Arkane] could work with Bethesda," Colantonio says. "And he tells me the full story from their side ... they were super excited by Arx but it was too late because we had signed ... and he was very excited with Arx 2, specifically the combat, and he came back to the office and told them how great the combat was."

But again, it was too late.

"All along for those years they had observed us and he knew that at some point he wanted to work with us. Whereas we had no clue that they had awareness about us. So at some point when they expanded outside of owning games and they had this plan to acquire studios ... one of the games that they wanted to make was exactly the genre that we're making now: first-person, immersive with depth and player choice and a mix of action and RPG at the same time. And he wanted that specifically ... so there was only one option."

"We got approached by Bethesda," Smith says. "There was a moment when I met with Todd and we had lunch and ... it was like ... 'Goddamn, this guy actually understands what made these games special.'"

The terms of Bethesda's acquisition of Arkane have not been made public, but the deal was announced in 2010 at the annual QuakeCon convention put on by id Software, creators of Doom. id Software is also now owned by Bethesda.

Colantonio will only say of the acquisition that it was a good deal.





It's important for us to work with people who 'get it.'

"The thing here, what I'm trying to say is the value of being hard-headed back then and sticking with the plan," Colantonio says. "Stick with what we want, and not be so attracted to whatever the trend is and whore around like most developers back then. The value was huge because eventually it paid off.

"In this case, paying off meant that we didn't sell to [just any] publisher; we sold to the publisher that was meant for us. That would understand our values and supported us for what we wanted. Because they came for us. It's not, like, 'We just wanted to acquire some dudes, and hopefully you can make some stuff for us but we don't know what yet.' It was, 'We want you guys to work on what you know, and do it with the right horsepower.' That is awesome."

For now Arkane is focusing on Dishonored, and holding the company steady. It doesn't want to get too far ahead of itself. It recognizes that for the kinds of games it wants to make, growing too big too quickly could be disastrous. Just as it was for Origin.

"Since we've been very consistent about what we like, then it naturally attracts the right people," Colantonio said.

He and Smith believe that the team at Arkane represents the perfect size and the perfect assemblage of creative talent. Video games are made by teams, not individuals, and Arkane understands this better than most.

"There are a lot of people here who worked on Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah, Deus Ex ... like, tomorrow if we doubled the size of the studio those people would be drowned," Smith says, finishing the thought. "There are these invisible values here ... we don't want to have to fight that, so it's important for us to work with people who 'get it.'"

Colantonio says that this appreciation of invisible values, this shared love of games no one else is making, is what drew Arkane to Bethesda in the first place.

"They make games which again are consistent with our culture and values," Colantonio said. "They have games that are super hardcore. If you look at Arx Fatalis and the [Elder Scrolls] games, we're pretty close. They totally get our values and vice versa."

"I think we're better now at articulating them too," Smith said. "When you're younger you just kind of feel a certain way. You say, 'No, I don't think it should be that way.' And you have a big fight about why. But nowadays you can say, 'Here's why.'"

"It's funny, because those games like Skyrim, or our games," says Colantonio, "the experiences where people go crazy about these games is always because of ... the unpredictable weird things that get generated by the systems in an unexpected way, and they get away with it. Those are the moments that everybody talks about."

Moments like playing with trash cans and crates in Deus Ex or shooting unlimited arrows in Arx Fatalis. Moments that make the games that we play feel like more than just games. Moments that make us fall in love with playing. Moments we will remember long after we've stopped.

For almost 20 years, Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith have been creating those moments in game after game. And now, together, they're ready to do it again.