Arkane Austin Studio Director Gives Emotional Goodbye to Colleagues, Wonders about the ‘Sweet Spot’ Team Size

09.05.2024 - 05:31 / wccftech.com / Arkane Austin / Alessio Palumbo / Deus Ex

Arkane Austin is officially no more, and Studio Director Harvey Smith, who has worked at Arkane for over sixteen years, shared all his emotions in a long and heartfelt thread on Twitter/X. Over the course of his 30-plus-year-long career in the industry, Smith was a lead designer at Ion Storm on Deus Ex, a director on Deus Ex: Invisible War, and a designer on Thief: Deadly Shadows. After a brief stint at Midway, he joined Arkane to be a creative director, designer, and writer on the first Dishonored.

He then moved to Lyon for a while, where he held the position of creative director on the Dishonored sequel and Death of the Outsider before returning to Arkane Austin as the studio director to lead Redfall. In the thread, the game designer expresses all his love and pride for his colleagues and what they went through together as a relatively scrappy studio.

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I just want to say that I love all the people at Arkane Austin so much. Great times, hard times, we went through so much, together. Of course, today's news is terrible, for all of us. Your talent will lift you up, and I will do anything I can to help.

Some notes on Arkane. What a place. It was 16 years for me. Some games I will always treasure. Very proud of the team and culture. No place is perfect, but we cared a lot and put in effort. Over the years, there were so many great people at the Arkane studios. Yesterday, as we packed up and reassured one another, I spent time with people who were part of crafting Redfall, Dishonored 1, and Prey, yes, but prior to that, Deus Ex, Ultima, and countless other games that left a mark on me.

The people around me have mostly been so great, at Arkane Austin and Lyon, Id, Bethesda, Tango, Machine Games, ZOS, and all the others. Developers, marketing and PR, external production, QA (heroes), just ongoing lists of amazing people. Years of relationships.

For Arkane, I started at a time when we were struggling. Independence is hard. I was person 4 at the tiny Austin office. The two studios were very integrated, but at the time directed from Austin because Raf was there. Of course, Lyon had some of the founders too, and critically important creative and technical people.

We connected to Bethesda, made Dishonored, the Knife of Dunwall, the Brigmore Witches. The number of difficulties along the way could fill a book. But the number of glorious, hilarious moments could fill ten. We segregated the two teams, I moved to Lyon for 4 years, where we made Dishonored 2 and Death of the Outsider. While Raf, Ricardo, and many others, including key Redfall leads, stayed in Austin and created Prey and Mooncrash.

I moved back, we