Dishonored Director Harvey Smith Launches New Studio With Former Arkane Veterans
Harvey Smith, the designer behind Deus Ex and Dishonored, has launched a new game studio called Black Pony Immersive, staffed almost entirely by former Arkane developers. The US-based studio has been operating quietly for a year and currently employs 26 people, according to an interview with The Game Business.
Smith leads the studio alongside Ricardo Bare and Ben Horne — two long-serving Arkane veterans in their own right. Bare brings 27 years of game development experience, including stints at Ion Storm and Midway Games before 15 years at Arkane. Horne came from 2K, where he produced titles in the NBA 2K series, and rose to production director at Arkane. VGC confirmed the studio's size and leadership.
The studio plans to focus on immersive sims — a genre built on player choice, where problems can be solved through stealth, combat, hacking or conversation rather than a single scripted path. It is the genre Smith helped define, having co-designed Deus Ex and Thief: Deadly Shadows before serving as creative director on Dishonored and Dishonored 2.
For fans of those games, Black Pony's mission statement carries a familiar weight. Smith told The Game Business the studio intends to build the kind of games it loves rather than chase industry trends, as reported by VGC.
The announcement arrives two years after a painful chapter for the developers involved. Microsoft shut down Arkane Austin in 2024 as part of wider cuts across its gaming division. The closure also meant the end of Redfall, a co-op vampire shooter that served as the studio's final release. Players banded together to fight a vampire legion that had quarantined a Massachusetts island town — a departure from the immersive sim formula Smith was known for. He had served as co-creative director on the project.
Before the studio was shut down, Arkane Austin was reportedly pitching an immersive sim to replace Redfall — a project that never received the green light. The lineage behind Black Pony stretches further back. Deathloop, Arkane Lyon's time-loop thriller released in 2021, emerged from publisher Bethesda's hesitation over whether to greenlight Dishonored 3, according to Arkane co-founder Raphaël Colantonio, as reported by VGC.
Black Pony Immersive has not yet announced its first game. The studio has spent its first year building a team and establishing its direction. With 26 staff already in place and a clear genre focus, the question now is what form its debut project will take — and whether a new studio, free from publisher uncertainty, can deliver the kind of game its leadership spent decades perfecting.
