Raphael Colantonio

Raphael is the founder of Arkane Studios, and creative director of Prey. We talked to him about the history of the studio, and the resurgence of the immersive sim.

What was it that you wanted to achieve in founding Arkane Studios, and why did you settle on Arx Fatalis as your first project?

Back then I was 28, I think. And my favorite games were Ultima, Ultima Underworld and Thief. I wanted to make one of those. A PC game, hardcore, first person, somewhat RPG—a mix of action and shooting. I had no idea about the market; was that going to work or not? And it actually was super hard, because as a first game, being there directly on PC, making your own engine was just a crazy idea.

But it kind of worked out. The game back then was not successful—it’s probably more successful now than it was back then—but it kind of announced to the rest of the industry, “hey, these guys over in this small city in France are into these kinds of games.” That brought some bigger publishers, and then eventually Bethesda came to us and they wanted the really big, triple-A version of all of that. That’s kind of what I wanted. There was no specific roadmap for it, because you can’t really plan something like that, to be honest, but it was all about passion and what we wanted to do.

After Arx Fatalis, you partnered up with Ubisoft for Dark Messiah which was more of an action-focused thing. Was that in response to the difficulties of making Arx?

A little bit, yes. Arx was more of a critical success than a financial success back then, and that did hurt us. Publishers knew we had some potential, but at the same time we could not back up our potential with sales numbers. So yes, when we worked with Ubisoft back then, I think both them and us wanted the kind of games that we liked, but this time maybe going with a more commercial approach. Something that was less obscure and less hardcore.