Harvey Smith and Arkane Austin Veterans Launch Black Pony Immersive Studio

Harvey Smith, the veteran designer best known as co-creator of the Dishonored series and a key figure on the original Deus Ex, has announced the formation of Black Pony Immersive, a new independent studio dedicated to first-person action RPGs and immersive sims. Smith is joined by fellow alumni of Arkane Austin, the studio Microsoft shut down in May 2024, leaving 96 developers out of work. The new venture arrives just days after Deus Ex director Warren Spector announced he was stepping away from the industry entirely, making Black Pony Immersive a rare note of optimism for a genre whose fan base has been starved for new entries.

The studio's mission statement pulls no punches. "Think Deus Ex, think Dishonored, that's what we're doing," Smith has said, and the studio's own website drives the point home with a direct nod to Looking Glass Studios, the pioneering developer behind Thief and System Shock. Smith acknowledged the difficult timing head-on, quipping, "We chose the worst time in history," a reference to the broader wave of layoffs and studio closures that has swept the games industry. Despite that, he says the team is committed to falling back on what they love and working with people they trust: "We're going to fall back on what we love, we're going to work with the people we love." Black Pony Immersive's name leaves little ambiguity about its creative direction, and its lineage, spanning Smith's tenure at Arkane from 2008 to 2024, gives it as strong a pedigree as any new studio in recent memory.

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