[STEAM] Game devs Harvey Smith and Ben Horne unveil Black Pony Immersive to craft action RPGs | interview

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Veteran game developers Harvey Smith and Ben Horne revealed

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, a new game studio built to design and develop imaginative first-person action RPGs set within well-realized worlds.

They want to make games where players create their own memorable experiences with expressive, emergent game systems. The studio isn’t huge, but it’s built on the belief that their approach to making art fueled by passion can pay off as it has in the past.

The studio was formed by Smith, a multi-award winning industry leader with more than 30 years experience in game design and studio leadership, who previously co-led the groundbreaking Deus Ex and Dishonored series, as co-creative director on Dishonored, creative director on Dishonored 2 and lead game designer on Deus Ex.

Smith is joined by executive producer Ben Horne, both having collaborated for over eight years together, most recently at Arkane Austin.

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You can play as a male or female version of Morgan Yu in Prey.

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, a French studio established in 1999, opened a second studio in Austin, Texas, in the 2000s. Smith was a game tester at Origin Systems, the maker of the Ultima series led by the Garriott brothers, and rose to be an associate producer on Ultima VIII.

He went on to Ion Storm’s Austin office and became lead designer on Deus Ex and Deus Ex: Invisible War, working with game designer Warren Spector. He moved to Midway in 2005 and was lead designer on Blacksite: Area 51. After that, he joined Arkane Austin in 2008, joining Raphael Colantonio. ZeniMax Media, owner of Fallout maker Bethesa, acquired Arkane in 2010.

There, Smith had a good run, serving as co-director of

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(2012) alongside Colantonio and director on

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(2017) — both award-winning games.

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acquired Arkane in 2020 when it bought Bethesda for $7.5 billion.

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But Arkane Austin’s downfall was

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, a vampire combat game that required a major investment. But it didn’t land well with players. In March 2024,

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Austin. The turmoil of the game industry caught up with Smith and Horne.

Smith thought that was the wrong call. But he and Horne started trying to raise money to build a new studio. They didn’t have much luck because funding was drying up for traditional game studios. They might have fared better if they had an AI and games idea.

Horne added, “We spent time talking to many different funding sources. Some of them VC related, some institutional investors.” No dice.

A restart

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Ricardo Bare is a veteran of Arkane at ****** Pony Interactive. Source: ****** Pony Interactive Part of the team includes Smith’s frequent creative collaborator

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from the Prey, Dishonored and Deus Ex teams. Smith and Horne have worked together for almost eight years now.

Horne came out of sports games such as the 2K basket baskeball games, which was a very structured production environment.

“But his heart was always in something more creative, more interesting, new IP creation, that sort of thing, and that’s what we’re doing,” Smith said.

“Harvey mentioned we tried starting a new studio. It may be like the worst time ever. It’s just been a very rough time in the industry, money going into a lot of different places,” Horne said.

If you were making NFT blockchain style games in the past, or GenAI games more recently, you could raise money. But the ****** Pony team wanted to make games that they were passionate about, not games that were attached to an overhyped trend.

“We wanted to purpose-build a team that could make these games, and it seems almost revolutionary in a very silly way to just double down on that,” Horne said. “We just want to make something that we’re passionate about. We want to try to right size our project and our team with what we think can be really successful.”

Hard times

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****** Pony Immersive logo. Smith said it’s hard to pinpoint why the times are so hard. They have something to do with a backlash over the oversupply during COVID. The money used to be virtually free when interest rates were low, and now they’re high. Costs used to be lower in an environment of low inflation.

“Everyone has a **** theory. Our costs just getting too high. And, well, games are making more money too. Is it a fatigue over the same type of game? Is it ****** hole games where everybody’s just playing Fortnite over and over for years,” Smith said.

I noted that Matthew Ball, now chief strategist at

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’s Xbox, noted the attention war has heated up and there is a lot of competition for our eyeballs now. Smith said that theory from Ball was a “smart idea.”

“We’ve talked about that before internally as well.

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Reels are eating some of the best parts of a generation. Are we going to have a lost generation because instead of going out and building a company or starting a band, people are just sitting there all night, doom scrolling or scrolling one cat video after another,” he said.

“But my belief is that you fall back on what you love. You fall back on fundamentals. You think about the player experience, and when there’s no obstacles in your way, the lane is clear, and you’re working with the right people, lightning strikes sometimes,” Smith said. “You work on games that people still talk about 10 years later, 20 years later. I was not a central figure on the original System Shock. I was the lead tester for 10 months. I supported that team. And it was like drinking from a fire hose with Doug Church and Looking Glass and those guys.”

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He said he learned so much from Church in a kind of boot camp for game designers. He worked with Warren Spector on Deus Ex, and now

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.

“We worked on Deus Ex together, and we applied everything we had learned from those past projects like System Shock, and it was central to that project, right? And it felt like lightning striking, right? Fast forward 10 years, Raph Colantino and I worked on Dishonored,” he said. “I worked on Dishonored too, while Raph did Prey. Sometimes. it all comes together, and the feeling is indescribable because it’s not just a speech you gave or a painting that’s hanging on the wall.”

Smith said he loved it when players connected with the games and spent 40 or 100 hours on it. He recalled there was a player wedding related to Dishonored. There was an avant-garde play in Germany based on Deus Ex. Players wrote their own fan fiction and created fan art.

“When you get it right, it becomes a part of their life in the way that a great music album does,” Smith said. “When that lightning strikes, you just want it again and again, and you want to make the next game that people talk about five or 10 years later.”

Smith said he loves games like Shadow of the Colossus, Journey, Red Dead Redemption or Portal. One of his favorite games is a mobile game called Hoplite. He also love Inscryption and Elden Ring.

“It was one of the first games I played in many years that actually had a sense of mystery. And when you’re working in complex systems, you have to explain everything. You have to have UI. It has to work in a certain rational way. It’s hard to have mystery in that, right?” Smith said. “In a horror movie, it can be about mystery. But in a video game, it’s about systems and user interfaces. It’s hard to actually be mysterious.”

He added, “I think all the business stuff aside, and all the doom and gloom stuff aside, what I’m really trying to say is, if you get the creative right, and you get the team right, and the studio values right, a lot of that follows.”

I noted it was probably tougher to raise a lot of money, build a big team, and then find late in the development that the extra money needed to finish the game wasn’t going to come. Those circumstances could prove to be much harder to get out of than if you start a studio in a tough time, where you’re trained to raise smaller amounts of money.

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Prey is a sci-fi action game from the same studio that made Dishonored. “We think this is a way that we have a bit of an advantage being smaller, being independent, being more nimble. That allows us to be able to find the talent where the talent is, and to be able to say, ‘Let’s grow this thing together.’ And we may find that we don’t have all the answers figured out,” Horne said.

The company budgets money to send people on trips a couple of times a year so the team can all work together in person for a little while. Sometimes that happens with small departments, Horne said.

“That in-person currency is so valuable now that we have these summits where we are able to come together, do that work, and have that face time, and then also be able to to work wherever we live, and we think that’s a big benefit,” Horne said.

The company could still use more money. Smith has hope that some of the indie game companies that had mega hits, like Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, now have hug war chests that they can put into their next games but also possibly invest in other studios. That could generate more double-A or triple-I indie game companies, Smith said.

“I think it’s great when these kinds of highly successful, unexpectedly successful projects can turn it around and make strategic investments for themselves, so that everything is not banked on their next game, but rather they’ve deployed some of the money to a number of other groups and maybe one of them hits and it’s just a healthier diversified strategy for them,” Smith said. ” But it’s also very nice in that the money is coming from a place actually inside the industry with people who understand the industry instead of from a group that has you know is putting their toe in the water to see if they make money.” Yeah, I love that.”

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