Dishonored Director Harvey Smith Opens New Studio, Black Pony Immersive, in Austin
Harvey Smith, the co-creative director of Dishonored and creative director of Dishonored 2, has announced a new game studio called Black Pony Immersive (GameSpot). The studio is based in Austin, Texas, and was revealed via a press release on 19 August 2026.
Smith is partnering with Ben Horne, who most recently worked at Arkane as production director on Redfall — a first-person shooter that launched in 2023. At Black Pony Immersive, Horne will serve as COO and executive producer (GameSpot). The two bring decades of combined experience from Arkane, the Lyon- and Austin-based studio known for immersive games that give players wide latitude in how they approach objectives.
Black Pony Immersive is built to design and develop first-person action-RPGs — games played from the character's own perspective, combining real-time combat with role-playing progression — set within what the studio describes as "well-realized worlds with emergent gameplay systems," meaning systems that produce unscripted outcomes from the player's choices rather than following a fixed script (GameSpot).
The studio's official website expands on that mission, stating its goal is to build "imaginative, narrative-rich games set in well-realized worlds where players create their own memorable experiences with expressive, emergent game systems" (blackponyimmersive.com). The site carries the tagline: "Through the looking glass, we're chasing a dream of mystery, meaning, and creative play" (blackponyimmersive.com).
No project has been announced yet. The studio has not disclosed a publisher, platform targets, a release window, or headcount plans.
For players who followed Smith's work on the Dishonored series — games celebrated for letting players solve problems through stealth, supernatural powers, or brute force in a world that reacted to their choices — the studio's description of emergent systems and narrative depth will sound familiar. Horne's tenure at Arkane, meanwhile, connects him to the same tradition of player-driven level design, even though Redfall itself received a mixed reception at launch.
The Austin setting places Black Pony Immersive in one of the United States' established game-development hubs, home to studios including certain Arkane and Blizzard offices. Texas has also been a site of industry workforce shifts, with layoffs affecting multiple studios in the region over the past several years.
What makes the announcement notable is the pairing: a creative director with a proven record in the immersive-sim genre — a category of games that prioritises player agency and systemic world simulation — joining forces with a production director who recently shipped a major title. Whether their first project channels the critical success of Dishonored or charts new ground entirely remains unknown until the studio is ready to show more.
